Dave Collier
Experimental artist based in Carlisle, north-west England
M
y developments pages serve two functions: one is to coalesce my ideas on the perception of images, especially colour, and the second is as a repository for the software I design for manipulating images to experiment with the first.Every two-dimensional image you look at is an approximation. The most photorealistic image is but an approximation, it is giving you clues that you say looks like the scene it is meant to be depicting but these are just clues, whose effectiveness for your perception is down to a number of factors.
It’s not uncommon to look at a picture that looks quite different from the scene you see in front of your eyes and be convinced that it looks completely realistic. A monochrome (black and white) or dual-tone image is a case in point, though not always, the tri-hue image on this page doesn’t look especially ‘realistic’. It has been designed not to. Even were it monochrome in any of the three hues, it still wouldn’t.
From the artist’s point of view, there isn’t a whole lot of point in making an image (with a pencil, brush, stylus or whatever) look photorealistic since you might as well take a photograph. I’ll set aside fantasy-land images, where combining elements of different concepts – a man with a serpent’s head – has its genre and it may be appropriate to be photorealistic, and concentrate on a two-dimensional plane where the artist wants to tell the world something about a scene that makes the audience see their world with another eye, to walk about with their eyes open.
Mood comes into this. The artist may want to point to the gloom of it all, or the delight of it all, or in between those extremes to show that there are shapes, colours textures and sub-moods that are there for the seeing, but not always seen, for our eyes are trained by our culture and history to see things in a taught or fixed way.
But more than this, if there are ways for the artist to open those horizons for those who see their images, then I am interested in how this process can be aided by automation. This is quite a broad topic that I shall elaborate on on these pages as I get the time.
My interest is in looking at crucial elements of an image, those that provide the strongest clues, and why, in terms of line, shape and colour.
These pages include some software for photo-manipulation, or more accurately image-manipulation (it doesn’t have to be a photo). These software scripts are all my own work, they are experimental and attempt to demonstrate something as explained on each product’s page. The software is free-to-use, on the basis that you should not expect any support and do not expect it to be fully bug-free. It’s experimental.