Summary – to send the top back area of your apple into the distance more will help your apple look more rounded and realistic. You are using the principles of lighter cooler colours with blurred detail to achieve this goal.
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- Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Second.
Challenge #95: Draw 1000 Apples in Under 60 Seconds
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Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
11-20-2017 09:20 AM
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Last week’s solution can be found here!
This week is Thanksgiving week in the USA and I was thinking of two ways we could take these challenges: 1) Make it super easy to match the short week or 2) Or long. long enough to give those of you balancing in-laws, distant relatives, and chaos this week a temporary escape. I hope the Weekly Challenge can be that one work thing you really ‘need to do today or my boss isn’t going to be happy’. I went for the latter. Weekly Challenge has got your back.
This week we are focused on working with data from the game of “Quick, Draw!”. Here you can play a game where the computer asks you to draw a picture, and as you draw the picture live, the machine will guess what you are drawing based on a wealth of pictures from other users – machine learning at it’s finest!
This week we will try to take around one thousand pictures of apples from a special file type called .ndjson (new-line delimited JSON) generated from “Quick, Draw”, reconstruct it into an image, and develop a heat plot of all the apples and some samples of apples that were drawn. Each record in the data set represents on drawing and contains an array of numbers that represent pixel coordinates on the canvas of the picture ranging from 0-255 for both x and y. The syntax of arrays are as follows:
For additional documentation on the simplified .ndjson file, see here.
The file we have provided contains 1000 apple drawings, but if you are interested in drawing 150K of them or something else entirely check out all the full library of data here.
As an output, try emulate the output that we made here in PDF:
Drawings will run onto a second page or more based on how it was sized
A tool from the predictive tool install was used in this solution. If you’d like to generate the visual shown in this sample PDF, please go to downloads.alteryx.com and download our predictive package. If not, just try drawing all the apples with a workflow!
This week there will be no start file! Instead we have attached two things – 1) The .ndjson file from which the drawing are constructed (we are not providing a start file because connecting to the data is a big part of the challenge) and 2) the PDF of the desired output.
what is still life?
Still life is the term for art work which includes different objects.
Traditionally, artists would choose objects which were very symbolic. They would paint flowers to make the viewer think about life and beauty. They’d paint a skull to make the viewer think about death. Perhaps they’d paint a gold candlestick – to make them think about luxury and money.
why did Cezanne paint. apples?
The objects Cezanne chose to focus on in his paintings weren’t very symbolic, or very fancy. He often chose to paint. apples!
By focusing on these local, familiar objects, Cezanne draws our focus back to the everyday. He did this as a way of slowing down in amongst a busy world.
He enjoyed studying these apples from many different angles, often showing different perspectives on one canvas – making his work almost 3D!
How did Cezanne inspire modern art?
Cezanne is now known as a Post-Impressionist and called ‘the father of modern art’ because he showed how free art could really be.
He encouraged artists to explore colour, shape and space without needing to make sense in a traditional, realistic way.
This approach influenced Cubism and postmodern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vanessa Bell, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Jane Simpson and Njideka Akunyili Crosby – who have all created still life artwork in their own unique style.
What do you see in Benode Behari Mukherjee’s Still Life With Key? He made paper collages like the one above after he lost his sight. His still-life twist was mixing shapes with recognisable objects, and his sense of touch was really important to the way he made art.
What stands out most to you about Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Predecessors? She’s combined a still life scene with a portrait, and layering all sorts of materials – from charcoal to magazine cut-outs – to show a mix of Nigerian and Western cultures.
Step 7: Fill the whole middle section
- During this next stage, it’s time to put on some Bright Orange (C080) to help the red blend nicely into the yellow. Travel around the outside edges of the yellow areas and leave the centre darkest area free for red.
- Add the red to the inside of the darkest area – go ahead and fill the whole middle section now – right over the top of all of those colours beneath. The colours beneath are our textures. The red is translucent so those shapes will stay there. I just started the middle section here in this image – you can continue and colour the whole middle section with red (C120.) Use long curved strokes travelling the full distance and quite a lot of pressure, with a little bit blunt tip (so your pencil doesn’t break.)
- Add more of the warmer colour yellow (C040) to the outside of the apple and some beneath it in the reflected light area. Look for where you see yellow in the drawing below and in the photograph of the apple.
- Add more yellow (C040) to the top front area of the apple then some white over the top (right in front of the stem) and more white into the highlight.
Step 8: Add the final details
- At this stage you can keep on adding any of the colours that are needed to bring your apple to completion. The darker areas beneath should provide your apple with the shadow edge area. Remember that you may not see the shadow edge very well in the photograph because the camera doesn’t capture everything we see. Add your shadow edge area as you know it should be – darker than the rest of the apple. You can use lots of circling now with a blunt tip on the pencil. You can do this with your C300 Indigo or C120 (Red) or both.
- Add more yellow and some C500 (Lichen Green) to the outer right side edge of the apple and the base of the stem to send those areas back a bit.
- Add some tiny finishing touches; those little pale pinkish beige coloured markings. You can use the battery operated eraser if you have one. Prepare it to a lovely pointed tip by rolling it across sandpaper on a slight angle (while its turned on.) Erase the markings with the tip of the eraser and then colour a bit more into the areas using some C180, C500 and white.
Tada! You are finished your Juicy Apple, well done!
Take your skills to the next level. Hyper-realistic Apple!
By applying more advanced techniques and more colours you can achieve an even more realistic drawing. The apple drawing above in included in the Coloured Pencil section of my Complete Online Drawing Course.
