Today saw the finishing of the portrait of Ivan Pavlov, with a slightly lighter grey in a smaller brush size (3 pixels - real brush size 8). I've found that using a slightly larger brush than the projected brush strokes leads to some nice overlaps and gives a bit more interest on the level of detail, rather than having a very clinical approach. Ana had to add a slight addition to Pavlov's hand, as it was not picked up well by the patch and running a smaller virtual brush size of fewer pixels was picking up to much of the noise of the type that you can see on the right side of the picture.

Below, is a timelapse of the final layer, as well as the first, background layer applied for a portrait of Henry Ford. The background layer involved the first testing of a new technique that involves the transformation of the colour palette whilst the painting is in progress. Although not so successful on this layer, some refinements should hopefully yield some exciting results. Using a much larger brush size, with the speed of brush strokes up as high as they are led to some quite exciting painting and some very interesting brush-work, partly because the speed of their execution adds to them an air that they were done by someone who knows what they're doing, there is no hesitancy there. This, of course, is true to some extent but the worker's knowledge is limited only to the micro-action directed by the machine, not the holistic hesitancy-crushing of the creative's macro-vision.

The Ford portrait will hopefully be the first one using colours other than black white and grey.

Also, today, the first research into the correct proportioning of colours that will, in the future, allow the computer to calculate the exact mixture of primary colours need for a particular hue. Using a syringe, 0.5ml of white acrylic was added to 1ml of black acrylic, with an increase of 0.5ml of white each time. The shade created was painted onto a large chart, with the exact ratio of black to white written underneath. This chart will then be scanne into a computer and a colour analysis performed to see how the ratios between the two colours relate to the RGB colour scale.

A preliminary look at the chart suggests the relationship is not a linear one, with a long plateau of increasingly indistinguishable greys, once the 20:1 ratio of white to black has been surpassed. This information will be analyzed and presented in more detial, along with the time and motion study analysis at a later date.

Also, I just found this link to photos from the New Fordist performance we did in January