Finger painting

[daveman]

No, not like you did in kindergarten.

This Photo of Morgan Freeman Will Blow Your Mind, Because It’s not a Photo at All

One of the most recent videos to go extremely viral over the past several days involves a behind the scenes look at how a portrait of Morgan Freeman came together… and when we say came together, we mean created from scratch on an iPad by finger-painting!

That’s right: the portrait you see above is actually an iPad finger-painting by artist Kyle Lambert based on this photograph taken by photographer Scott Gries, and we’ll be darned if we can tell which one was done on a freaking $6 tablet app and which one was captured on an actual camera.

Here’s a video showing the process of creating the portrait from start to finish in an app called Procreate on the new iPad Air:

[scott]

I love how this video shows that he's a sculptor. That's what he does, he lays a foundation and then strips away all the stuff that isn't "Morgan Freeman." That said, I don't think this was done with his finger. Unless the video is just an illustration, there is no way that level of precision can be achieved without a stylus.

If this inspires people who have an iPad to explore their own capabilities, great. If this is a marketing gimmick to sell iPads to people who have never studied art, FAIL.

[daveman]

I love how this video shows that he's a sculptor. That's what he does, he lays a foundation and then strips away all the stuff that isn't "Morgan Freeman." That said, I don't think this was done with his finger. Unless the video is just an illustration, there is no way that level of precision can be achieved without a stylus.

If this inspires people who have an iPad to explore their own capabilities, great. If this is a marketing gimmick to sell iPads to people who have never studied art, FAIL.

I think all he's doing is changing the Brush size when he's doing fine work.

[Norm dePlume]

Well, that would have been a lot easier to just start with a photo and selectively smudge it away, then run the video backward.

[daveman]

Well, that would have been a lot easier to just start with a photo and selectively smudge it away, then run the video backward.

Well, crap, ANYone can do that.

[scott]

Well, that would have been a lot easier to just start with a photo and selectively smudge it away, then run the video backward.

HA!

[phillygirl]

Very cool. I've always loved Morgan Freeman's face. There's something about it that's just beautiful. I wish he'd do away with the earring though.

[Gingersnap]

The artist is using a virtual brush that is about 2 or 3 pixels wide. There's been a lot of chatter about this on artsy boards ranging from applause to hisses. The hisses mostly because there's technique that involves simply blowing up the photo to the pixel level and then simply recreating the photo block by block.

Takes a huge long time but is essentially the virtual version of "painting by numbers".