> The online attention hasn't always been helpful; Omori recounts someone commenting "You should have just taken a photo." And as his symptoms worsened, he stopped drawing altogether and resolved to burn his drawings.
Amazes me how some people can be so daft to say such things to someone, maybe a way to feel superior or some messed up psychological aspect.
I agree with you. Such a stupid and shallow comment speaks only of the person who said it, and nothing of the intended subject.
As a father who tries to raise three healthy children, though, I also marvel that such a shallow comment could have such an adverse affect on someone. I do realize that the man is a savant, thus already four or five standard deviations away, but perhaps our society should reconsider the early childhood learning strategies that produce such insensitivities. Maybe we should return to letting children insult one another and not intervene - thus enabling the children to learn to deal with such comments. It won't completely solve the problem for people like the man here, but it would certainly help.
I don’t even think that saying stupid and shallow comments speaks to the person who said it. Don’t we all say stupid and shallow things every day? It takes serious effort to filter thoughts in such a calculated way so it’s always the “perfect” thing to say. It might be even neurotic to constantly try this. We are all failed, but I’d like to think just most of us did not really had bad intentions. Maybe just a bad moment. Or some bad insight. :)
> I also marvel that such a shallow comment could have such an adverse affect on someone.
Some of us are wired differently, and some of us are bullied to death. I'm both. Everyone can't create calluses against these kinds of shallow comments by playfighting, esp. if it turns bullying at life-threatening levels, and nobody intervenes, because they let children to be children.
As a result I grew very asymmetrically from get go. I got very ahead in maturity without the defenses I needed to front and process criticism. I left painting because everything I did was shot down (but I have won two awards for my age groups earlier), I had severe dance phobia for 20+ years because somebody mocked how I dance, and I left writing philosophical pieces because my English teacher mocked me.
Yes, I now dance, and write philosophical things (but not publish them), an old friend who was an art student said I can certainly draw, but I feel no enthusiasm now. The only thing I were unable to get me from me was computers, and I now have a Ph.D. (oh, my math teachers called me a failure, dozens of times, hah!).
So, no, we shouldn't raise people with "emotional battery induced numbness", but shall teach them to deal with harassing people by making them understand the mechanics. It's harder, but it doesn't make you collect these comments in an emotional waste basket and dump on an unsuspecting person who unintentionally triggered you on a bad day. Instead, you process and get rid of them, and it makes you genuinely happy without an overfilled emotional trash compactor inside.
That reads a bit like: „If you have more fun as a kid, you will never be depressed.“ I‘m certain this is not how it works.
The article dances around the topic (might be cultural differences), but OCD and depression are related[0]. So Kohei Omori might have been in a phase of depression, triggered by an online individual that stated his work is meaningless. That's nothing a childhood can prepare for. It‘s a disease.
I tend to agree. The world is, on the rough, a dark place. While each person should individually strive to make it better, life will throw at you far worse than a thoughtless insult.
With that said, as a general rule, creators, commenters and bystanders should keep in mind the difference between the time and effort that goes into making something, and the ten seconds that it takes to say something dumb about it. They are not the same.
What do you mean "letting children insult one another"? it seems to imply parents / educators have complete control of children's interactions, and this is simply not true.
That said, there should still be intervention; verbal abuse (which is what it's called when adults do it to one another) should not be normalised, and "deal with it" / "grow thick skin" isn't it either. Because they will take that "thick skin" with them in e.g. an adult relationship and use that normalised verbal abuse on their partner, kids, people they work with, people they interact with on the daily, who did not have that same (abusive) upbringing and thus are harmed by the abuse.
TL;DR, kids will be kids, but don't raise them thinking verbal abuse is OK and that it's the victim's fault for not having thicker skin. "enable the children to learn to deal with such comments" sounds like victim blaming to me.
I think
most people (safely) assume that saying such a thing won’t cause this response and some might say it because they find it a funny thing to say. I can imagine some people in my close circle of friends/family that might say it, but if they’ll find that it caused such a disastrous situation they will feel very bad…
I don't see this as a negative comment - it's clearly made by someone who appreciates the huge amount of effort required to make a piece of photo-realistic art and is trying to express their appreciation in a funny way by use of sarcasm.
It's a shame the artist decided to stop making art but it's not even explicitly stated in the article that he was affected by negative online attention. He may not have read the comments or he may have stopped because of his illness regardless of the comments.
As someone who spends most of their non-working hours practicing the art of hyper-realistic charcoal drawings, I don't take a photo because that'd rob me of the pleasure and joy of sitting down for several weeks of evenings and conjuring up imagery that's difficult or impossible to do with a camera.
For me, the point of creating such a drawing isn't to have a drawing, but the process. Using only my eyes, hands, a piece of burnt wood, and paper, I can capture something incredible - something that's not obviously going to work until it's completely done.
He uses Mitsubishi Uni pencils. His recommendation of sharpening the pencils "[Make the exposed pencil lead long] By making it sharp and long, the sharp will continue and it is easy to re-sharpen"
His YouTube video [1] shows his collection of pencils (the various grades) and the meticulous attention to pencil sharpening - which seems to be in two stages, the first is using a normal mechanical pencil sharpener and then the second stage is handcrafting the length of the lead.
To make the point evenly round and extremely sharp, one can use fine sandpaper as a last step.
For this kind of work with graphite the sharp point holds for quite a while. Color pencil artists tend to sharpen a lot more, and use automatic pencil sharpeners. And a lot of pencils.
I prefer to sharpen a few pencils in batches. Especially when using charcoal pencils, things become messy real fast.
I know a guy, in jail, with a weird brain injury[1] who they call the human photocopier. He has this ability.
The problem is people are always asking him to "draw Mickey and Minnie and a big love heart with my wife's name in it" and it is close to impossible for him. He almost completely lacks the ability to draw anything novel. If you give him pics of Mickey and Minnie he can combine them and copy them perfectly.
[1] he has an enormous scar from ear-to-ear from where apparently they had to do work on his skull as a small child because his brain outgrew it. He's not clear on the details as he was adopted at birth, his mother was an addict.
Google around for "hyperrealism", the techniques are well-documented.
You can see in a few pictures the existence of a grid. It was originally used to transfer/scale drawings, but is also used as a substitute for untrained eyes who would struggle to get fair proportion otherwise.
Then the rendering itself relies on pencils that are sharpened quite thinly: the thin lead will be less sensible to the paper grain, and provide a smoother result. If you want more texture, used a duller lead. An even softer texture, use a brush or a stomp.
Generally, you'll want to draw quite big, so as to have enough room to articulate the details.
Finally, the key difficulty, "trick" even, for hyperrealism, and for fine-arts in general, is patience: good results are often produced with plenty of time.
You can also see an iPhone held up on some which wouldn’t show up if it were all drawn by eye. So a photo was taken, printed, and then this was traced— which is still impressive it’s just a technique. The great renaissance artists used camera obscura.
His work is very impressive in some cases and extremely impressive elsewhere. But I think the curving on the can might be one of the weakest aspects of his art. In particular he seems to make a classic example of drawing a sphere/cylinder like this:
→ ⦇
Where the arrow symbolizes the camera and the tangent of the silhouette never comes close to parallel to the viewing angle - the horizon is sharp.
I could be wrong of course but I've seen (beginner!) tutorials teaching how to avoid exactly that.
I remember when I was young, and when looking at art I had this depressive feeling I could never make something so beautiful. I have just now repeated this experience.
This reminds me of works of Maurits Cornelis Escher. I believe his extraordinary observation skills are only part of what makes his work so remarkable. His deep understanding of mathematics and geometry is equally crucial to his creations.
There's microscopic details, and very shallow depth of field, so the nut and bolt was drawn through a lens, if not from a macro photograph.
Why isn't the artist visible in the reflections in #6? When Escher drew "hand with reflecting sphere" he drew every detail, including himself.
What is reflected? Is that a Japanese toilet, or ... a go-kart with a bucket seat?
What does the Casio use bluetooth for? (I searched and found out, it just lets you change the time via an app. Turns out you can buy absurdly expensive premium Casios, although they look much the same as cheap ones.)
It's true that you can change the settings via the app, but it also allows for automatic time adjustment, which is nice when you live somewhere where the time signal radio reception can be sketchy. (Australia)
You can also use the "find my phone" feature when it's nearby, which to my surprise I've actually done a few times.
These kinds of drawings are indeed copied from photographs. There is no secret in that. Sometimes an artist uses multiple photos, and adds some personal imagination for details, but sometimes no creativity is added at all.
The skill is mostly in the technique and perseverance.
Note to avoid downvotes: nothing wrong with this, I also do hyperrealistic drawings.
The Instagram video linked in the article looks like he is drawing from the watch sitting on the table. No photograph is visible. That might be intentional though...
A grid is visible in the background of the drawing. Such a grid is used to set up the initial outlines, by copying it from the reference photo with a grid drawn on top of it (typically done in Photoshop). Other artists use a projector to trace.
As another commenter mentioned, the depth of field removes any doubt that a photo is used as a reference.
Picking up and placing back the watch to see details would constantly change the lighting, especially in the details. It is impossible to get such a level of detail by "drawing from nature", even in studio conditions.
It's not a coincidence that paintings only became more realistic after the invention of photography.
In this video https://youtu.be/lVKT09eLTn8?si=ODZRS3cMvvDqlTOz it looks like he traces only the rough outline and fills in the details free hand. If so it is amazing. It's amazing too if he traces the whole thing from a photo. Chuck Close transfers the photo into canvas in small squares and paints the squares, so his style is more mechanical.
The world of art was completely transformed by the introduction of photography in the 19th century, because the capturing of lifelike scenes was no longer part of the goal, and we entered an era dominated by the artist’s imagination.
Now here we are on the internet and by far the most popular art is glammed-up photorealistic renderings of everyday scenes. The less detectable the artist, the better.
> The world of art was completely transformed by the introduction of photography in the 19th century, because the capturing of lifelike scenes was no longer part of the goal, and we entered an era dominated by the artist’s imagination.
That's a common viewpoint, but it's not quite true, for multiple reasons. A camera is a rather limited tool: it will transform colors, sometimes unpleasantly (value compression, color shifts), and can never quite capture reality as an artist would.
Then, while many paintings look lifelike, they still are absolutely out of reach of a camera. Landscapes in particular (e.g. [0]) are heavily staged: the light is invented, trees and mountains are moved around to fit various æsthetical choices, etc.
Or, consider how Bouguereau's, while life-like from a distance, are much less so from up-close (see [1]): the artist is among others playing with transparency and opacity of the paint to increase the feeling on depth and realism.
Art changed drastically during the 19th century, and photography played a role for sure, but IMO the decline of religion is probably a greater contributor.
I think that both viewpoints are correct. I would add that, importantly, the invention of photography changed the economics of picture ownership. No longer was it necessary to sit long hours and pay a ton of money to get a family portrait! Photographs were far cheaper, and to the untrained eye, "better" than the work of a mediocre portraitist. Of course, I would personally much rather have Ingres (for one) paint my portrait, but only the very wealthy could afford such a thing.
It's also a very common viewpoint but not true, as there are countless methods in which photographer can prepare for a photo. A quick argument: video is a stream of photographs. Do you think that movies can never capture reality as an artist would ;-)
Today's photography decline and digital method's popularity raise show - iny my opinion - that the trend is stable. Average person practices the most approachable form of art available to them. Shift from painting to photography happened not because it's subjectively better but objectively easier.
> Do you think that movies can never capture reality as an artist would ;-)
We’re talking about single photos here, not entire movies. Sure, if you make a 5-hours documentary about a subject you can capture everything you want, but that’s not comparable to a single photo or drawing.
Good writers can also capture aspects of reality in a way that’s impossible for photographers because "reality" goes well beyond what you see: thoughts, sentiments, sounds, smells, memory, feelings, etc.
> A quick argument: video is a stream of photographs. Do you think that movies can never capture reality as an artist would ;-)
I meant, limited from an artistic point of view! But it's indeed a fantastic tool, and the ability to carry one in the pocket at all time is quite a blessing, even for artists! It also offers plenty of otherwise hard to reach possibilities: filming blooming flowers, microscopy, etc.
> Art changed drastically during the 19th century, and photography played a role for sure, but IMO the decline of religion is probably a greater contributor.
And we have new tools affecting art today, artificial intelligence chief among them. Interestingly, that coincides with a rise in religion in many Western nations fueled by the influx of Islam to Europe. I wonder how people will view the effects on art and sciences in 200 years. Today, many people view both AI's effect on art and the rise of Islam in Europe very negatively.
I believe AI to merely affects art but superficially: by that I mean that it lower the cost of creation so drastically, that what it creates is essentially worthless. It can be pretty and enjoyable, but it's, at least for now, immaterial, and too dirt cheap to produce to bear any sensible intrinsic value.
Industry jobs might be somewhat at risks, as businesses tend to optimize for profits, but even there, I'd wait and see what happens in the long run.
> I wonder how people will view the effects on art and sciences in 200 years.
Hopefully we would have had a Renaissance 2.0 since then!
Were Islam to keep on growing (I do personally think it's more on the decline), I think we could expect interesting outcomes, artistically speaking, as Muslims visual arts, because they tend to shy away from figuration, are somewhat orthogonal to Western's forms.
> Today, many people view both AI's effect on art and the rise of Islam in Europe very negatively.
Islam has always been culturally foreign to Europe, and the current economical & social situation have a bunch of weird, highly chaotic side-effects.
Most of the Muslims I've met were generous, heartwarming and thoughtful, perhaps more than the average person. I know it's not systematically true either, but I still have little reason to not have an essentially positive view of them.
I've also met people who told me (literally) that 99% Muslims were bloody awful, by sole virtue of being Muslims: the same reasoning we had a few decades ago, when Jews were targeted for sole virtue of being Jews, not because of their individual acts.
> I believe AI to merely affects art but superficially: by that I mean that it lower the cost of creation so drastically, that what it creates is essentially worthless. It can be pretty and enjoyable, but it's, at least for now, immaterial, and too dirt cheap to produce to bear any sensible intrinsic value.
AI is already replacing a very long tail of small business needs for near-worthless art. This market was already dominated by Fiver and free stock photos / icon packs / etc. But like any calculus, the very long tail of small transactions added up to a non-negligible portion of the industry.
> Were Islam to keep on growing (I do personally think it's more on the decline), I think we could expect interesting outcomes, artistically speaking, as Muslims visual arts, because they tend to shy away from figuration, are somewhat orthogonal to Western's forms.
Islam in Europe is growing - mostly by refugees' birth rates. As I'm not Christian, and my own culture also prefers art without human or divine figuration, I absolutely love Muslim art. I've been to many mosques (and some Christian churches, too) in my country.
> Most of the Muslims I've met were generous, heartwarming and thoughtful, perhaps more than the average person. I know it's not systematically true either, but I still have little reason to not have an essentially positive view of them.
I agree with you 100%. But we're not talking about people - we're talking about culture. I can think of more than a single culture that I'd rather not live among, even if as individuals I value my friendship with individuals of that culture.
> I've also met people who told me (literally) that 99% Muslims were bloody awful, by sole virtue of being Muslims: the same reasoning we had a few decades ago, when Jews were targeted for sole virtue of being Jews, not because of their individual acts.
Yes, exactly, it's not hard to find somebody who hates other people. Don't let them ruin your perception of people - you'll find 99% of people to be fine no matter what culture they are from. But groups of people who maintain a culture among them - I have to say that some of these can be problematic. Paradox of tolerance and all that.
> This market was already dominated by Fiver and free stock photos / icon packs / etc
Let's add to this the use of digital art, which drastically reduced production costs (can't resist: [0]). I wonder however, if, in the long run, AI won't end up boosting traditional arts, and encourage higher creativity and skills from human artists.
> Islam in Europe is growing
In numbers definitely, but I was thinking in terms of "spiritual intensity".
Consider e.g. how Muslims feast during Ramadan at night: I doubt this is remotely aligned with the original intents. Same thing goes for other groups: hateful Christian despite Jesus's "Love Thy Neighbor", Jews celebrating murder despite Hashem's command, etc.
Perhaps "feasting" wasn't the right word: I would bet Ramadan was originally a time of rest, calm and reflection, and not about eating excessively all nights for a month.
Prophets usually encourage good measure, balance, not that kind of excessive behavior.
In my experience AI has a very negligible impact on contemporary art for now. Sure, it feels everywhere if your art consumption is limited to browsing the Web, but if you go out in museums and galleries it’s not that visible.
And yet, the olympics can be quite accessible depending on the sport and individual dedication, like the Australian breakdancer or the famous Jamaican bobsleigh team.
when I see things like this and people that are not just on another level but are at superhuman ability it really makes me wonder. I am pretty scientific minded and like to think of rational explanations but when I see things like this I wonder if this person is somehow distinctly different from myself. Do we have aliens among us? Is this Neo in the Matrix? I am not normally like that but how is it that some people have such a super ability like this, it is hard to comprehend.
Strange title. It's equivalent to "pencil drawings" but trying to take the long way around to evoking a CAD model render, but not using the relevant parts of that term.
"Photorealistic pencil drawings" is more clear description of the art.
The computing definition of the term came centuries after it was commonly used to describe what you are seeing in the article. "An artistic depiction of something."
Amazes me how some people can be so daft to say such things to someone, maybe a way to feel superior or some messed up psychological aspect.