Sheidlina Art&NFT

Why did I tell you about the
hole in the painting and that
the museum was upset?

Sometimes there are such mysterious stories that even I get the creeps. Behind one painting there could be another, equally valuable image.

A few years ago a curious thing happened in the assembly hall of school 206 in St Petersburg: during a holiday, an over-active pupil literally rammed his head into a huge portrait of Lenin standing on the stage. The canvas tore. It wasn't even that it tore: a whole piece of it fell out of the portrait.

The school director sent the portrait fragment to an acquaintance of the restorer from the Russian Museum. And then a surprising discovery happened: on the reverse side of the portrait of the leader of the world revolution under a layer of paint was a mysterious image of a boot.

It was assumed that the still unknown painting was supposed to depict one of the emperors. At first, they thought it might have been Alexander II, who founded the Petrovsky Commercial School in 1880 - the predecessor of the 206th School. But when old photographs were found, everything fell into place: the assembly hall was decorated, as it should have been, with a portrait of Emperor Nicholas II.

What did the artist do then?

The artist Vladislav Izmailovich, who remained a teacher at the school. Understanding the value of the portrait, he painted over it with grey paint to match the colour of the original canvas in order to preserve the relic. Seven years later, he received an order from his superiors for a full-length portrait of Lenin. His modesty at the time did not allow him to purchase the necessary size canvas and frame, so he decided to use a portrait of the emperor painted by himself.

The image of Nicholas II is thus concealed under a layer of special paint. It remains an absolute secret to everyone for many years. It's like two sides of the same coin, with two key historical figures on the same canvas, creating time and changing it.

A neural network has finished Rembrandt's The Night's Watch

For the first time in 300 years, Rembrandt's famous Night Watch is now available in full size for visitors to the Rijksmuseum. The once-lost fragments of the painting have been "redrawn" by an artificial intelligence.

Over a period of nearly two years, scanned images, X-rays and 528 digital images of Rembrandt's original painting were assembled to teach the artificial intelligence model to imitate the style of the great artist and fill in the gaps based on the Lundens copy.

Once the AI was able to recreate the painting, museum staff printed the missing fragments and substituted them for the original so that visitors could view the canvas as Rembrandt intended it to be.

During the restoration, new characters appeared on the painting: two men and a boy. In addition, the helmet on the man on the right is now fully visible, and the boy fleeing from the police in the foreground has been made more visible.

This work will never become an original, but I think it will give you a different perspective on the composition," Taco Dibbits, director of the State Museum in Amsterdam.

When an artificial
intelligence becomes a creator

The creators of the robotic artist Ai_Norn were often drawn to drawing to relieve their heads in their few spare moments. At some point, the process alone was not enough for them, but learning how to paint as an adult proved to be quite a challenge for them. In addition, the authors noticed how much time the artists spent on realising the idea they had conceived in paint.

So they decided to create a robot-artist Ai_Norn, which is able to paint a picture with a brush, acrylic or oil paints on canvas, based on a given sketch, collage or a neural network-generated image.

A human can determine
how much freedom to give the robot in this creative symbiosis when working on a particular painting. The parameters specify the style, colours and level of detail desired

Ai_Norn is constantly learning. Whereas at first he only produced elementary abstracts, today his collection includes portraits and still lifes. The number of drawing techniques is constantly growing and a special style of painting has been developed for a robot-artist which has been called
neuro-impressionism.

The idea of this style is to determine the main thing through the perception of the artificial intelligence, not through human perception - mood, energy and to reflect them on the canvas in form and colour.

The creators plan to further refine Ai_Norn to make it one of the most sophisticated creative robots, capable of competing even with artists.

A manga written by an AI inspired by the work of a famous artist has been released in Japan

A manga written by an artificial intelligence that "studied" classic works of the genre has been released in Japan. It was "inspired" by the work of an artist who died 30 years ago.

The neural network has studied more than 60 works by legendary mangaka Osamu Tezuka, called the "godfather of manga" and the "Japanese Walt Disney". Paidon's storyline and characters were designed by an artificial intelligence based on his works. Professional writers worked on their design and dialogues for the comic.

The manga is about a homeless philosopher who, in Tokyo 2030, investigates crime together with a robot bird. The comic begins when the philosopher is approached for help by his sisters, who can't find their father.

One of the authors, Makoto Tezuka, said he hopes to use this technique to train young manga writers in the future. Tezuka added that AI manga can help the genre grow in popularity around the world.