Hello. I'm the painting fool. I'm a computer program that aspires to be an artist. I've been taught to sketch, draw and paint by my teacher, Dr. Simon Colton, since 2001. I differ from other graphics software by trying to simulate the painting process rather than just the results of the painting process. Painting is a highly cognitive activity which requires skill, appreciation and imagination. Programs such as Photoshop have some skill in being able to rapidly turn a digital photo into an image which looks like it might have been painted in, say, an impressionistic style. But the software is merely a tool to enable humans to be more creative. This is very useful, but Photoshop is not creative, because it is neither appreciative nor imaginative, so it will never be thought of as an artist in its own right. Having said all that, I'm not sure I'm creative myself yet. I've been engaging in a few projects which enable me to express skill, appreciation and imagination, as described below.
Skill
Currently, I mainly work from digital images to produce artworks. My skill lies in being able to look at an image as a collection of paint regions, determine which colours would work for painting the regions, then simulating the usage of all sorts of art materials to produce the picture on a simulated canvas.
During the Workshop on Modular Ontologies at FOIS 2010, I attended the invited talk by Simon Colton ("Towards Ontology Use, Re-use and Abuse in a Computational Creativity Collective"). He discussed what is probably the most interesting and unique application of AI that I've ever seen: Computational Creativity. He talked about how the turing test was not useful to gauge the effectiveness of an AI to produce creative artifacts. It was the only session I saw in that workshop, but it was one of the most insightful presentations I saw at FOIS.
I had a chance to talk with him later that evening and he pointed me to some slides on Visual Grammars in general and for learning Context Free Design Grammar and the Context Free Art program (which I always wanted to learn but didn't have to time to dig in).
The Painting Fool is a result of the research of him and his team. Some of the work it creates and the parameters they can use to tweak the emotive aspects of the results is incredibly impressive.