Statue inpainting

Mar 16, 2023 • Yousef Amar • 1 min read

I can't imagine I'm the first to try this, but new hobby acquired:

  1. Go to the British Museum (other museums with statues will work too!)
  2. Find broken statues
  3. Take a photo
  4. Erase the gaps (DALL-E 2 lets you upload and edit on the fly)
  5. Write the name of the piece as the prompt, with the date
  6. Use image inpainting to fill in the rest of the statue

I ran the ones below on the spot and it was quite fun. Before this, whenever I visited the British Museum (a few times a year), I didn't really give most of those statues a second glance.

An exercise for the reader (this one's interesting because they put a reference of what it could have look like if it were complete based on a different statue):

And another bust of good old Caesar (might be interesting as there's so much reference material, and it's so broken):

Try it and have fun! I'll try another batch the next time I go.