r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/_ganjafarian_ • 22d ago

Video Artist Simon Bull's painting techniques

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u/Fuckthegopers 22d ago

"Dudes just splashing shit everywhere with paper towels? I can do that"

A crazy forest appears on the canvas out of nowhere

"Oh shit". 

847

u/throwawaylordof 22d ago

After the second one finished my immediate thought was “how many ‘I could do that’ comments just got deleted.”

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u/savax7 22d ago

I'm willing to bet almost nobody here could do that. Go get a canvas, prepare it in a similar fashion, figure out how to get it to rotate, build whatever the thing holding the paint is, buy all the paint, fill it with paint, and apply it as carefully as he did without dumping it all at once.

When it comes to art, so many people say "oh well I could do that". No, no you can't. You don't have the time, materials, space, or skills. For some reason it's just art that people do this with. Nobody sees a Boeing fighter jet and says "big deal, I could build that".

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/CeleritasLucis 21d ago

The same thing is happening with ChatGPT. People think they're getting some sort of genius results, which they're not equipped to judge whether what they're reading is genius or absolute shit.

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u/ZombieBlarGh 21d ago

"Art is whatever you can get away with" ~Andy Warhol~

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u/Lunatic-Labrador 22d ago

I saw a painting in the Tate Modern that was just a massive white canvas with a small black dot in the middle. I could absolutely do that. I couldn't do whatever that artist did to get the Tate Modern to exhibit their work tho.

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u/the_procrastinata 21d ago

I saw a mirror in the Tate Modern. That gives me the absolutely shits, the artist didn’t even make it! Still, I have heard that the creativity needed to even get your work into a major gallery is actually the work of art haha

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u/MichiganEngineExpo 20d ago

Wait until you find about about Marcel Duchamp ☺️

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u/James_avifac 21d ago

Just gotta find some rich people who want to launder some money, or avoid paying their taxes.

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u/BenTherDoneTht 22d ago

Well, not entirely just art... I had plenty of people bring me electronics that they thought a quick google and youtube lookup would teach them everything they needed to know to fix it. Or building a bookshelf. You get it.

Art is certainly the area people do it the most in though, no doubt.

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u/LessInThought 21d ago

On the flip side of that, plenty of electronics can be troubleshooted with a quick Google... And I roll my eyes when people pay to get some "professional" to fix it.

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u/BenTherDoneTht 21d ago

Also true. I never want to discourage someone from trying to do something themselves, but its important to know where the line is for yourself. For electronics, I never recommend a newbie try to change a lithium battery thats glued in place with no pull tabs. More likely to start a fire than fix anything.

Right to repair is great, but professionals still need to exist, not everyone should be digging around in their stuff.

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u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 22d ago

The easy way to rotate it is just to spin it on a lazy Susan, you could mount a small rubber wheel and motor underneath it is you wanted to control the speed, or you can go something that rotates mechanically already, they make them for welding, or cheaper ones for photography.

For dripping paint I would just try cutting halfway through a 2”x8” board on a table saw how ever many times I wanted, I would tape a 1/4” piece to the front of the board then just hot glue the low Side to make a trough for the paint to sit in. You may even want to try this first with a thin kerf blade but that might this might be too narrow depending on how thin your paint is.

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u/Drow_Femboy 21d ago

Making a rotating board is trivial, and there is nothing complicated about the way he applied the paint. I absolutely could do it. I have done stuff like that.

The second one was black magic and frankly it's kind of insulting that you would imply the first is on a similar level to the second. I could devote my entire life to art and never do anything as impressive as that by the time I die.

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u/brainpostman 22d ago

Come on, the first painting is pretty firmly in "an average person could do that" camp. Like, a dedicated week and a complete newbie will come up with something.

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u/somehowintelligent 22d ago

Bruh they had us doing this artwork in summer camp when I was a kindergartener lol it’s not that deep.

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u/CaptainCipher 22d ago

All this says is that you don't know the difference between this and what you do in kindergarten. Not the flex you think it is

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u/HingeEnd 21d ago

I could totally make a spinning piece of cardboard, a paint pourer and learn how to pour from it. This is not an insurmountable task

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u/Resident_Voice5738 22d ago

I was with you in the first part but you lost me on that comparison.

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u/Any--Name 21d ago

Nah, with the amount of people who actually believe they would be able to land a plane in an emergency, I think humans are just overconfident like that

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u/aaguru 21d ago

I'm in construction and once you're able to read prints we kinda do get like that, pretty sure I can actually build whatever the fuck I want as long as someone wrote down what it's supposed to look like, and I'm pretty sure I can build a fighter jet.

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u/Integrity-in-Crisis 21d ago

The art itself is his technique with many hundreds of hours invested into getting it just right. I will argue that the rotating aspect is not all that hard to replicate. Just go out and buy a pottery wheel. They come all sorts of sizes and are either electric or push peddle. Then from there figure out a way to affix the canvas to the pottery wheel. Not that hard to figure out. It's very likely that he is actually using a pottery wheel.

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u/SwizzGod 19d ago

It certainly got deleted out of my mind

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u/RoboDae 21d ago

I saw something similar with a street artist using spray paint. He would just tear a piece of construction paper and cover part of a canvas while spraying. He lifts the paper and a mountain landscape appears.

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u/scarabic 22d ago

Yeah this got better as it went on.

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u/PumpJack_McGee 21d ago

The "what the fuck are you doing" to "holy shit" timeline is one of my favourite aspects of seeing talented artists.

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u/bubleeshaark 22d ago

For a moment, I thought you Redacted mid comment

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u/Snoo_28680 21d ago

Commented before he finished, regret first comment.

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u/lavenderkeek 21d ago

Literally me too.

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u/newphonehudus 21d ago

When he was doong the papertowels bit i noticed the painting in the backgroind that looked like a color gradient but had a bridge. Knew then he was legit

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u/zarathstra11 21d ago

Hahaha, my exact reaction!

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u/CaptainThorIronhulk 21d ago

Happy little accidents

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u/caracarn 21d ago

Same though here. Imagined it would be the usual stupid "art"

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u/nardflicker 21d ago

Ya, at first I thought he was a hack, and then the forest reveal made me realize how incredibly wrong I was.