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Comment by zombieprocesses | Hacker News Reader

"When trained to paint celebrity faces, the agent is capable of capturing the main traits of the face, such as shape, tone and hair style, much like a street artist would when painting a portrait with a limited number of brush strokes:"

That's interesting. Do we know how artists draw? Is it as "algorithmic" as the article lays it out? I don't draw so I always assumed it was more intuitive and personal rather than a "step by step" process.

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Methods are very individualized and vary also by medium. Check out the "Manben" videos:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x65w5fu

It is eye-opening, even among fellow manga artists, to see how different sometimes their processes are.

Some may start with a definite sketch, others may go straight to ink with only the barest suggestion of a layout. Sometimes they struggle with expressions and may whiteout and re-ink (up to seven times in one of the videos.)

Some artists start inking with the eyes, some may start with an outline of the face. And so on.

There are a variety of methods. Some people will teach you formulaic approaches to drawing people/faces, and instruct you to always lay out the 'proper' measurements that most people fit, then just add detail. More traditional methods teach you to draw what you see, but focusing on the structural lines and forms of the person, while merging it with knowledge of anatomy, perspective, and lighting. And other methods are purely 'draw what you see', without additional context, trusting accurate copying to paper to look correct.

What any specific artist uses will vary greatly. But it usually falls into one of those three camps.

I think its more of, if you want to depict something with the minimal number of strokes, you really have no option but to look for the key, defining traits of the object. In that fashion, both the AI and the artist must operate similarly, simply due to the limitations implied by the task

But depicting those traits is another matter. You can render a chin meeting the hair in all sorts of ways; but your choices are limited to your aesthetic preferences, and your ability to draw that form.

Drawing is a highly mechanical process; choosing what/how to draw is a curated one.

I think there is a bit of both. If an artist learned on their own, it may be more intuition (or, step-by-step, but they don't realize it because they don't think about the individual steps). But if you take a drawing class you will learn a lot of steps that you can reproduce.

A good striking example, do a video search for "two point perspective drawing", and look at some of the tutorials / demonstrations that come up.

Intuitive and methodical drawing aren't mutually exclusive. You can derive a method from intuition. Skilled draughtsmanship is somehow technical but will always lack something when confined to purely methodical rendering. Most people who draw cannot exactly explain how they do it. And yet it is a completely learnable skill—albeit somewhat difficult to teach.

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