Arnheim 1.0 overpainting on photographs

Using Arnheim 1.0 [see prev. blog post and paper here] I've been doing some experiments today with overpainting on photographs. Can A1.0 deal with understanding an existing photograph and adding meaning with the paint marks? Again I continue my obsession with plane crashes. I had a photo of Cromer lighthouse I took last week and used it to produce the following. I'm always most excited about the first picture in a series, but I keep doing them, and then I'm unable to tell which is good and which isn't anymore. This one was "plane crashing into a lighthouse".

and "lighthouse on fire"...

it goes on...

and...

birds...

pineapples...

some more birds...

maybe another plane crash..

a whole bunch..

There is something I like about these, and something I don't. They are too illustrative perhaps, I'm not sure. Maybe I need to allow erasing of the image too, or scaling of the background image in some way, re-tinting, or something, I'm not sure. Something to integrate the painting with the background image a bit more. I think tomorrow will be photos of faces with masks evolved on top. This is in the tradition of some of Richter's stuff here and maybe Rachenberg to some extent.

My first artistic rejection came today when the first image did not get accepted to the NORFOLK COUNTRYSIDE PHOTOS (NCP) facebook group. Perhaps they didn't like me tampering with the photo in this way, especially crashing planes into their lighthouses, which might have been seen as visual terrorism. I'm thinking of maybe adding to ploughed fields, hunting parties, and pheasants next.

In other news, early attempts to turn Manet's lemon into a mango have not gone well, but I think I might know whats going terribly wrong....

Finally, I recommend Aaron Hertzmann's analysis of the AI Art cycle, which is a good lesson. I think the excitement of discovering a new tool is pretty exhilarating, to have a new toy that no-one else has used before in quite this way, I'm having a lot of fun.