Artist Assist App

I discovered something new today, thanks to Liron Yankonsky's YouTube channel.  It's the Artist Assist App.  It seems to be a website at the moment rather than an app but the big news is that it's free!  The best way to find out what it does is to go in and explore it, but I'm going to highlight two things here.

First, it can come up with the closest possible colour mixes to what you see in photographs.  I loaded up this photo of John Lydon and all the colours in my main palette, then clicked in the middle of one of his cheeks, to be told that I could match that colour really closely with Winsor red, viridian and cadmium yellow in 4:3:2 proportions.  I can even change the size of the area under consideration if I don't want to analyse individual pixels.

I'm not one for using loads of colours and trying to perfectly replicate what I see, so I'll never be a slave to this feature.  I might, though, find myself skating around a new source photo looking at what colours it recommends in various places and use this to select my three primaries and maybe even the odd extra colour.

And second is the feature that is most intriguing me.  The app can take a photo and create a three glaze painting plan like this:

The first photo shows the first glaze with all the light but not white areas.  Then the second has a mid value glaze added overate top and the last one has darkest values added on top of that.  Somehow seeing all this in computer generated photos makes multiple glazes easier to implement.  It takes away the stress and worry that by the time two glazes have gone down you've forgotten what you were going to do with the third.  This tool makes it ridiculously easy to follow some of the ideas in the Liz Chaderton book on portraiture.

This app definitely looks interesting, even if it's giving off big cheat code vibes.

I've already had a go using the glazing plan – the result is in my next post.