It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Classic Art Inspiration for Game Artists
Hey folks,
For years now I've been noticing how disconnected we are from classical art as digital artists. There is such a treasure trove of brilliant creative thought and yet we still usually go to the same 3 places as source of inspiration. The OGs have some amazing takes on dramatic lighting, environment composition or even outlandish character design yet most of us in the gaming space can barely tell our Zorn apart from Sargent.
I was looking for ways to make it easier for us to be closer to this knowledge and be inspired by it so ended up making ImagineMore.art as a side project. It's one of the biggest collections of classic art in one place in an interface that is actually built for artists and not stuffy collectors or some other nonsense.
A few key points:
Natural Language Search: You don't need to know the names of anything. Just describe what you are looking for with words and we'll use our really smart search to surface you the best results.
"More Like This": Once you find one example of what you like, you can keep going down rabbit holes learning about different painting movements just by clicking "More like this".
Visual Search: You can upload your own WIP and it'll find classical references with similar compositions/lighting. Super useful when you're stuck and need to get genuinely fresh ideas. Always great to see how the masters handled similar scenes.
Analysis Tools: Evaluate values, histogram, composition, color palette directly on the page to understand why the pieces work. For example it's amazing to see how much of classic art follows the Rabatment composition principle. Especially since aspect ratios were all over the place. And don't get me started on Bouguereau's perfect value distribution and soft lighting.
The more I've been working on this the more I've had my mind blown by all of this inspiration I've been missing out on for most of my career. We ended up starting social accounts to share these daily - if you're tired of divisive news and want to see the best of art instead, we'd be grateful for a follow. But not as grateful as we would be for any bugs you might find or feature suggestions you might have 
What classical artists have you found most useful for your work? We are constantly expanding the library and would love to add more artists you've been inspired by. I'd love to keep polishing with your feedback and make it really easy for everyone to have the perspective of Rembrandt or Monet in their pocket. I strongly believe that game artists are some of the best artists of our generation period. Some of our shit will be studied in museums and I'd love it if we remembered that this is the legacy we should both be living up to and striving towards.
Replies
We actually have planned a really nice feature specifically for value breakdown of images that we believe would be
really helpful. I'll make sure to ping you here once it's up and running 🙂
Regardless of the intent of the website (exploring a space of visually similar things, if I understand correctly), searching for something as specific as an artist name should bring accurate results, or nothing at all if not referenced.
Also the title of the website itself gives a sus vibe, as "imagine more art" makes it sounds like one of the many AI generators out there.
The analysis tool being locked behind a login is another not-quite-red-but-almost-red flag IMHO. And then it seems to lead to a completely unrelated product advertised as "Unlock world-class creative feedback to elevate your art". So if this is just a thinly veiled attempt to onboard people into some kind of "AI feedback" generator, thanks but no thanks (or at least, just be upfront about it).
It's a fair point that the expectation is to look by an artist name. And if you look for someone we have, like Monet for example, you will get some results and then continuous options in the style of Monet. If it's not there we'll just show you pieces that might look like it.
Our search bar is designed to by default be visual rather than metadata-based. This is intentional - we want people to search for *what* they're looking for ("dramatic lighting," "stormy seascape," "portrait with soft shadows") rather than needing to know specific artist names or tags. Our thesis is that if you just describe what you want you are likely to encounter happy accidents you didn't consider. Which is conducive to "imagining more art".
Regarding the login requirement - I understand the concern. We ask for registration to help us understand how people use the platform so we can optimize it and continue providing as many features as possible to as many people as possible free of charge.
When it comes "world class creative feedback" - it's one of my favorite features:
having the ability to find images similar to yours but with better lighting or color has been absolutely exquisite in figuring out what can be done to improve. I've been using this personally and that's how I produce all the feedback I offer on polycount and it made a huge difference to the speed at which cool visual ideas can be arrived at.
I'm as pissed off as you are about the abuse that we've seen from sketchy AI companies and am never going to permit that anywhere around me.
https://imaginemore.art/?library=Classic+Art&attribute=user%3AJohn+William+Waterhouse
You can see all his pieces following the link and the visual search works further within his collection too.
I'm quite confident DDG or your local library can't do that kind of visual browsing 😉😋 (most relevant results start from top left!)
My one lament is that the back button doesn't function, and I don't see a built in back button on the website, to go to the last viewed screen?
Going to bookmark this and keep poking around, for sure!
Edit: Regarding favorite artists... James Tissot has some amazing religious work. His name is in your system, but only his most traditional portrait work.
@Joopson
Thank you on James Tissot! We are looking into getting more of his stuff 😍
And I have some solid progress for the navigation issue you mentioned - should be close to being resolved. Once again really appreciate your feedback. 🙏