If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after being fed through Faceapp (which can change age, gender, etc.), then altered in Photoshop, and then painted in Corel Painter. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like portraits from parallel dimensions or alternate universes.
This one is a double portrait. If you’re following this series, I often share them in pairs for comparison purposes, though they aren’t intended as diptychs. This is just one piece, not two, and it is intended to have both heads in it.
A careful observer may notice that there’s not enough room for them to be standing side by side, though the woman’s shadow implies they are. Artistic license, folks.
Here are some details:
In this piece the parallel universes coexist and are bleeding into each other. Others pieces have hinted at this as one piece seems to be reacting to another, as in #9 & #10:
I don’t know how these people will evolve or relate to one another until I make them.I don’t even know which one I will do next, or what I’ll do with it.
Here’s all 13 so far (in reverse order):
Stay tuned
~ Ends
And if you like the (experimental) sort of art that I do, and you don’t want me to have to quit or put it on a back-burner, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. Through Patreon, you can give $1 (or more) per month to help keep me going (y’know, so I don’t have to put art back on the back-burner while I slog away at a full-time job). Ah, if only I could amass a few hundred dollars per month this way, I could focus entirely on my art and writing. See how it works here.
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
You’re right. Being bald ain’t so bad 😛
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Who said anything about being bald? It works for Joe Rogan. I think this guy looks kind of ridiculous, in a good way.
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This one looks the most sci-fi. I find the woman to be the most beautiful from all your experiments + there’s something sad about her expression, as if she just woke up in an alternate universe she didn’t ask for. I kinda wish I saw a little of her right ear, that side looks rather flat to me.
The reason I haven’t voted is because with each new post I tell myself “yup, this is it, my favorite so far”.
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The ears are always an issue. My ears don’t stick out to the side much. I could have faked more of an ear. I can go back and fix them, but I’m tending to think I might leave my early flaws in place as I gradually improve at this. Well, I’ll probably touch up the most egregious errors. Hmmm. As I get better something might only take minutes to fix, even if I struggled with it for hours initially.
The app distorts faces, often atrociously, and so I have to go back in and tinker with them, even the best of them. I’m not a portrait artist – you’ve probably noticed by now that I have a lot of scope and rely on overlapping and triangulating skills rather than honing a specific skill – so am winging it as I go. Someone else would know exactly how to fix the images, but they wouldn’t know how to do all the other parts.
So, I figured out how to tweak out the app to get non-white versions. Basically, I discovered a glitch where it misinterprets my face if I feed an image through multiple times. Because I’m really stretching the capacity of the neural network, most the results this process produces are not usable, and don’t look at all convincing, but like really bad Photoshop manipulations in progress. However, if one tries enough the occasional combination works. So, now I already have a few non-white people I will include interspersed down the line.
I’m glad you liked the woman’s expression. It’s also what I liked. This interests me because I wouldn’t necessarily think something like that was as universal as it is. How do we read faces and expressions? And thanks for telling me about the flat side of her head. I thought the same thing but wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination. Your solution would also work, me thinks.
Thanks for following the series, and the next one is going to be a different sort of surprise, and introduces some new techniques I haven’t used so far.
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Whoa, this is exciting if you’re going to pursue non-white versions too.
You can always leave them as they are, to keep track of your progress in time. Or add more hair on her right side, to mask her ear.
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I’m coming up with strategies to sidestep the people who will accuse me of “black face”. I’ll start off with a more racially ambiguous person (she’s winking. She’ll appear soonish, in the next 6 images, I think). Later I’ll add ones that are more obviously black, and I’m working on an Asian person.
I know the accusations of racism directed at the inverters of the other app that was canceled due to protests. A lot of it had to do with people thinking the black people the app created were less attractive or had cliched features. I might pair them with some of my lesser attractive white people, (though I am only choosing attractive POC creations anyway, according to my eye).
Some accusations will still stick, no matter what, such as that I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America. But, I think in the context of all the other images, if I do it tastefully and smartly, only the more firebrand ideologues will attack. Others might have to begrudgingly admit there’s nothing offensive about it.
Glad you like the new ear. It isn’t perfect, but it did help.
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I gave her an ear, and made some others adjustments. Check it out. I like it better now. On to the next one.
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It’s great!
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I try.
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