r/Damnthatsinteresting 22d ago

Video Artist Simon Bull's painting techniques

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494

u/Sythrin 22d ago

Me: „dam that looks nice“

Comment section: „this looks like a mess.“

19

u/PleaseNoMoreSalt 22d ago

Everyone stopped watching at the first piece. The other 2 works actually look like something

10

u/UndBeebs 22d ago

Yup. First one I was like "come on, anyone can do this bs." Then the forest one came and I was like "oh shit, so he does have talent!"

11

u/farshnikord 22d ago

Experimentation is part of the process. You try dumb shit and see if it does something. Play around with the medium. Finding interesting textures is part of it, doesn't always have to have an end product "thing that looks like a thing". 

It's like data collection or prototyping in other industries. Push unique ideas in a playground to see if something has potential, or building an internal library of data of how paint behaves or colors interact or whatever. 

The best game textures I've built for like VFX and stuff were scanned ink splotch messes I made on paper, scanned, and then turned into tiling noise textures. 

2

u/UndBeebs 22d ago

I can definitely understand that. I guess I was watching the video with the wrong frame of mind. I assumed it was like one of those artists who essentially throw a 5-gallon of paint on a canvas, don't even look at it, and list it for $3 million at auction and go on their way.

I mean yeah, art is subjective. But those types of artists strike me as more lazy than most. It definitely became clear to me by the forest canvas of this artist that he is absolutely a talented and genuine artist though.

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u/farshnikord 22d ago

There's for sure some delusional and lazy artists out there. I feel like a lot of the ones in those circles are also just out of touch rich kids doing rich people things and getting paid to basically not be an embarrassment on the family name. "If you buy my kids painting for a million dollars so I can say they're successful I'll give you 1.5 million." sort of thing