Isita's Senior Project
Project Work
A Step By Step View of my Progress
This is an overview of my project work! If you wish to see a more detailed log, the pink button below leads to my biweekly blog on my project.
Each image is a gallery with Julia Domna, Livia Drusilla, and Agrippina Minor in that order.
You can click the below button to see the blog on your own, but if you are following the guided trail, please keep scrolling!
Finding Reference Sculptures
Researching Facial Structure and Depictions
For every empress, I found about 20 sculptural depictions from the time period, making sure to exclude any art done later in history than the Roman Empire (e.g. Renaissance paintings). Most sculptures are done in marble as it was extremely conducive to sculpture making, however there are some unique pieces such as the intaglio pieces (the ones that look like jewels).
Please Click Through The Gallery To Look at My Work For Each Empress!
Finding Their Colors
Researching Hair, Skin, and Eye Color
Because there was not too much written information on how each of my figures looked, I had to improvise. For example, with Julia Domna, I recorded her features based off the Severan Tondo, where she was featured with her husband Emperor Severus. I also took into account heritage, such as Julia Domna's origin in Syria.
There was also an interesting fashion trend of wigs at the time of Jules and Liv, which was cool to explore!
Please Click Through The Gallery To Look at My Work For Each Empress!
Colorizing The Sculptures
Digitally Painting The Sculptures Based On Research
On my iPad with the free drawing app Medibang, I overlaid color layers on the base black and white sculpture image. By decreasing the opacity of my coloring, I was able to conserve the natural shadows falling upon the face and in the curls of the hair. Some sculptures differed significantly in facial structure for the same empress, but generally many stayed the same.
Please Click Through The Gallery To Look at My Work For Each Empress!
First ArtBreeder Creations
Breeding the Images Together For the First Time
Let’s talk a little about what ArtBreeder actually is. ArtBreeder, previously known as GanBreeder is an AI-powered art tool that allows you to “breed” and combine images to make new ones. (https://www.artbreeder.com/about). ArtBreeder uses a type of artificial intelligence called a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN. Now what exactly is a GAN? Most machine learning and deep-learning algorithms basically take in data and make predictions of some sort. GANs are unsupervised models, meaning that they do not know the right answers of any of the training data points. On ArtBreeder I can input the colorizations and the software will generate different possible images that combine the features of the colorizations.
The first images were close, but not yet photo-realistic as shown.
From there, only improvement was possible...
Please Click Through The Gallery To Look at My Work For Each Empress!