Selecting Masterpieces to Recreate with Our Robot

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Spent afternoon with Hunter exploring the National Gallery of Art to decide on the next masterpiece we are going to recreate and analyze with our robot. Saw the da Vinci, many Van Gogh's, and lots of other paintings before being drawn to Monet. And as we looked around at several Monets, it became obvious that he had a special artistic style that would lend itself well to replication by our robot and Deep Learning algorithms. In the end Hunter and I decided on the painting  the artwork on the left below - Monet's "Woman with a Parasol."

Now if we could somehow program our robots to capture and paint the wind across her face like Monet did. Wow, that would be amazing.

Brushstroke Maps for Three Famous Paintings

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When you Google "Famous Artwork" a list of paintings is revealed, and at the top of that list is da Vinci, Van Gogh, and Munch. Here is a picture of the top ten actually...

Now that we have a stroke map of the Mona Lisa and The Scream, we decided to round up the top three by creating a mapping of The Starry Night.  Interestingly, The Starry Night is probably one of the best examples of the importance of brushstrokes in a painting.  There is nothing but flow in it.  And a major part of the composition is the movement made by the direction of the strokes. 

If we could somehow capture how Van Gogh used his strokes, well thats impossible, but if we could at least learn something from them. Well we will never know until we try.

As of 7:00 PM January 8, 2017, cloudpainter has just barely begun to explore the strokes of Van Gogh's The Starry Night.  We realize these first strokes are rudimentary, but its just laying down a background. Over the next several days we will attempt to copy as many of the strokes with as much detail as possible. These will be stored in an Elasticsearch database and shared for anyone to use in attempts to deconstruct Van Gogh's brushstroke.