DualFace: Two-stage drawing guidance for freehand portrait sketching

Special skills are required in portrait painting, such as imagining geometric structures and facial detail for final portrait designs. This makes it a difficult task for users, especially novices without prior artistic training, to draw freehand portraits with high-quality details. In this paper, we propose dualFace, a portrait drawing interface to assist users with different levels of drawing skills to complete recognizable and authentic face sketches. Inspired by traditional artist workflows for portrait drawing, dualFace gives two-stages of drawing assistance to provide global and local visual guidance. The former helps users draw contour lines for portraits (i.e., geometric structure), and the latter helps users draw details of facial parts, which conform to the user-drawn contour lines. In the global guidance stage, the user draws several contour lines, and dualFace then searches for several relevant images from an internal database and displays the suggested face contour lines on the background of the canvas. In the local guidance stage, we synthesize detailed portrait images with a deep generative model from user-drawn contour lines, and then use the synthesized results as detailed drawing guidance. We conducted a user study to verify the effectiveness of dualFace, which confirms that dualFace significantly helps users to produce a detailed portrait sketch.

Designing Visual-Arts Education Programs for Transfer Effects: Development and Experimental Evaluation of (Digital) Drawing Courses in the Art Museum Designed to Promote Adolescents’ Socio-Emotional Skills

An active engagement with arts in general and visual arts in particular has been hypothesized to yield beneficial effects beyond arts itself. So-called cognitive and socio-emotional “transfer” effects into other domains have been claimed. However, the empirical basis of these hopes is limited. This is partly due to a lack of experimental comparisons, theory-based designs, and objective measurements in the literature on transfer effects of arts education. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to design and experimentally investigate a theory-based visual-arts education program for adolescents aged between 12 and 19 years (Mage = 15.02, SDage = 1.75). The program was delivered in a museum context in three sessions and was expected to yield specific and objectively measurable transfer effects. To conduct a randomized field trial, three strictly parallelized and standardized art courses were developed, all of which addressed the topic of portrait drawing. The courses mainly differed regarding their instructional focus, which was either on periods of art history, on the facial expression of emotions, or on the self-perception of a person in the context of different social roles. In the first and more “traditional” course portrait drawing was used to better understand how portraits looked like in former centuries. The two other courses were designed in a way that the artistic engagement in portrait drawing was interwoven with practicing socio-emotional skills, namely empathy and emotion recognition in one course and understanding complex self-concept structures in the other. We expected positive socio-emotional transfer effects in the two “psychological” courses. We used an animated morph task to measure emotion recognition performance and a self-concept task to measure the self-complexity of participants before and after all three courses. Results indicate that an instructional focus on drawing the facial expressions of emotions yields specific improvements in emotion recognition, whereas drawing persons in different social roles yields a higher level of self-complexity in the self-concept task. In contrast, no significant effects on socio-emotional skills were found in the course focussing on art history. Therefore, our study provides causal evidence that visual-arts programs situated in an art-museum context can advance socio-emotional skills, when designed properly.

Portrait drawing of the Great Patriotic War. Documentary and artistic evidence of eyewitnesses

The article highlights the need to create a portrait drawing in frontline conditions. One of the important factors is the creation of portrait images, posters, aimed at the propaganda of military activities in the Red Army. In addition, the artists were fully interested in creating sketches for paintings, portraits, diary entries reflecting reality not only for agitation, but also for the creation of creative works that contain their own view of the working days of the frontline soldiers. The analysis of the paintings shows how similar and at the same time different the portraits are. To a large extent, the differences are due to the place of battles, their complexity and the circumstances in which the portrait drawings were created. The images of people were united by moral and volitional desire for victory, the imprint of fatigue on the face, the experience of relatives and friends who became close in battle. One of the important aspects for understanding the portrait image is the conditions for creating a picture - it is a portrait after the battle with combat weapons, wounded in hospital, at a concert, in the working environment of the headquarters, writing a letter in a trench. The models for portraits were as a rule people close to the artists and who belonged to the combat unit where they served.

Human Emotional Care Purposed Automatic Remote Portrait Drawing Generation and Display System Using Wearable Heart Rate Sensor and Smartphone Camera with Depth Perception

We propose a system that automatically generates portrait drawings for the purpose of human emotional care. Our system comprises two parts: a smartphone application and a server. The smartphone application enables the user to take photographs throughout the day while acquiring heart rates from the smartwatch worn by the user. The server collects the photographs and heart rates and displays portrait drawings automatically stylized from the photograph for the most exciting moment of the day. In the system, the user can recall the exciting and happy moment of the day through admiring the drawings and heal the emotion accordingly. To stylize photographs as portrait drawings, we employ nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) methods, including a portrait etude stylization proposed in this paper. Finally, the effectiveness of our system is demonstrated through user studies.