February 19 2023, 23:09

In the last post, I showed my (non) workspace. Here, I’ll talk about my “invention” for transferring references onto the canvas. I recorded the video about two months ago when there was still no oil paint. Well, now it’s the same, just with oil.

So, how it works. I attached a phone holder so that the phone faces the drawing. Back then, two months ago, I ran a special app, EpocCam Pro, which broadcast everything captured by the phone to my computer. The new MacOS has this feature built-in, so EpocCam Pro is no longer needed. On my computer, I made a simple program in Python/OpenCV “on the fly,” which takes the camera image and “projects” a semi-transparent reference image onto it. Since the camera looks at the canvas at a slight angle, there also happens to be a perspective correction.

In separate windows, a black-and-white image from the camera is displayed, allowing me to see my drawing not only reduced but also — separately — in monochrome.

That’s not all. I got carried away and created a feature to separate the image into layers based on brightness. You define the number of layers, and you can “project” onto the view from the camera all the dark spots (like from the range of 85-100%), then switch to all the less dark spots (like from the range of 75%-85%), and so on up to the brightest spots (0-10%). Theoretically, you can draw layer by layer, starting from the darkest and ending with the lightest. This might be something to try as well. If it works out, I’ll share. This trick doesn’t really take off with colored images, but with monochrome, it indeed does. Something else could possibly be devised for colored images. For example, separation by colors.

All in all, I made this thing a few months ago, and only tried it out today on oranges (see the previous post). Essentially, it helped me transfer the outlines onto the canvas faster and more accurately than I would have without any automation. Specifically for oranges, there’s practically no benefit, as there’s no place to make a mistake. Whether I would have drawn a lemon a bit more to the left or right, no big deal. But if it were something complex, it could theoretically be useful. I should try it with a portrait, for instance.