Tuesday, 7 July, 2020 UTC
Summary
Art & AR: Modern Artists use AR instead of Art Projectors
In today’s post, I am going to give you a bit of history on optics in art, AKA tracing technology, and give you a demonstration of how artists are using AR to draw large pictures using an app called Da Vinci Eye.
History
Professional artists commonly use tools like graphite paper or projectors to trace outlines of their subjects before starting a drawing or painting.
It's not that they couldn’t draw them freehand… it's more that they want to produce their artwork quickly and efficiently not having to worry that an eye or a nose is accidentally out of place halfway through their piece.
If you think its cheating consider that artists throughout history have used tracing tools, broadly referred to as optics, from Da Vinci to Vermeer!
- For more info on optics check out David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters
The progression of optics in art creation has progressed with advances in technology… here are a few interesting dates…
- Camera Obscura (500 BCE)
- Camera Lucida (1806)
- Overhead Projector & Slide Projectors (1853)
With the popularization of augmented reality on smartphones, artists now have a revolutionary new optics tool that greatly compliments the creation process.
With AR artists no longer have to work in the dark, they can compare colors, sizes, and shapes, with greater detail than ever before… and they can even breakdown their drawings by color values to help them understand their reference photos.
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AR makes it much easier to learn to draw as well, essentially having a teacher show you exactly where you should be laying down lines and colors.
The AR App
If you don’t already have the Da Vinci Eye app, you can download it here:
Download Da Vinci Eye for iOS
Download Da Vinci Eye for Android
Getting Started
For this demonstration, we are going to draw this photo to fit a 14 x 17 piece of paper:
1. Start by drawing a large circle. This is just for reference so draw this pretty light. This is going to represent how big the head is going the be. (Note that I made my circle roughly the same shape as her head)
2. Enlarge your image to match the size of the circle. You are basically making a hole, then sticking the face in it!
*You can now erase the circle you made as you won’t need them anymore*
3. Begin to trace the reference image as you normally would. The secret here is we want to make some areas as exact as possible because we are going to use these areas as reference points later.
You’ll notice that because your phone’s camera is so close to your paper, you can only see a small section of the paper. So how do we draw the other parts of drawing?
That’s easy… We just move the phone to where we want to draw next! Make sure to follow the next steps in order to correctly do this!
4. Press the move button, and with just *1 finger*, move the image to align with your reference points. In this case, I’ve drawn the lips in pretty fine detail… so I am going to use those as my reference point.
Just get it pretty close because you can just nudge your cup to get it precisely aligned.
*Do not forget to press the move button again when you are done aligning your image.*
5. Now just keep repeating this step of drawing a section, moving, and aligning.
This whole outline took less than 5 minutes!
Video
Click here to watch a video of this process.
Thanks!
If you have any questions please reach out via the email button in the app or directly [email protected]
Never stop creating…
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefArt & AR: Using AR instead of an Art Projector was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.