Thread by @ganbrood

thread:

My Jesus portrait is going pretty viral on Twitter at the moment, without me being tagged so for everyone interested here is a little info on the process of constructing it:

@OmarjSakr

I have been a professional photographer for the last 14 years but I have a background in Computer Generated images and Special Effects.
A little over a year ago I stumbled upon the #artificialintelligence #Artbreeder software (formerly Ganbreeder) which utilizes a neural network

trained on photographs and paintings of thousands human faces. This application makes it possible to combine multiple sources of faces and merge them in a synthesized version, guided by the artistic decisions of the user. I use it to create historical and fictional characters.

When I was playing around with several cultural depictions of Jesus of Nazareth of Byzantine and Renaissance origin including Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi", and the Turin Shroud.
Tweaking the ethnicity to a more convincing Middle-Eastern face.

I was happy with the result as a representation of a collective cultural depiction but at the same time I felt it lacked any historical accuracy. So I changed the hair and beard to a more credible length and style for the time and region and I brought in elements found in

some #Fayum mummy portraits, pushing the renaissance art to the background. The result is a artistic impression of how this man could have looked, more than it is a scientific search for an exact likeness.