Art as a reward for work done

I tent to reward myself for actually finishing something, and these days, that is a huge thing. Well, I just signed off on a very major project (an editing job), so here I am -- celebrating. I call this one, above, "Little Angel." It's pure AI, though it could have been done in CG, if I had 5x more processor power ... and the bucks to buy the hardware. I haven't. So it's 100% Jen's imagination, and otherwise, free AI, because that's what I can ruddy-well afford right now.

This one mind you, is 70% AI plate and 30% Photoshop painting. The original plate was done in dream.ai (Wombo), and if you know anything about Wombo. you'll know  that it being free is the best thing about it. The images it tends to produce are very prosaic, very flat. But, being so flat, they tend to lend themselves to painting, so ...

This one is about 55% AI plate and 45% Photoshop. It's a first foray into colorization, where you can take a b/w sketch and turn it into colour art, the kind of thing you may see in graphic novels. I have a few ideas that might bear fruit in the future when then the merciless domestic situation (Dave and The Diagnosis from Hades ... argh) has resolved itself somehow. Till then, everything is just an idea, but if I didn't run with my ideas, I really would go bananas. Hunh.

Pure AI. Note the change in the signature line. No, I never claim to have painted something that I didn't paint. On the other hand, when I've painted ... you'll know about it. So I'll just paste in the rest of this batch, and let the adjusted signature line tell all:

...and I shall return with more, when I have something to celebrate, and award myself the treat of art as a celebration.  Thanks for looking! 

 

Art as a means of survival. Call it therapy.

 

Well ... if you've read my previous post, you'll know what my biiiig problem is at the moment. How many times are you told to prepare for imminent widowhood, and how are you supposed to deal with it?! Beats heck out of me. I don't have any more answers to this question now than I had in October last year, when the bombshell dropped on us from a great height. But life goes on, and even though I -- honestly, seriously, genuinely, unavoidably, do not have time to do artwork, the images and imagination are still bubbling away inside my brain. Now...

You know me. Normally, I don't actually approve of AI. I've always said that AI art is not real art -- and it isn't. That belief hasn't changed, and won't change. Art is where an artist sits down with tools and hours to spend on a unique project, and when they're done, they sign off on something that is a slice of their personality, a taste on their soul, a mirror reflecting their psyche. That's real art. AI is ... well, it's like this:

But although that, above, is neither artwork nor photography, it is vision, it is imagination, it is  creativity. And there are times -- as I am discovering right now -- when AI has its part to play. My mind is still filled with visions. My imagination is still running hot and fast. Mentally, I have never been more creative, but there is no time or energy, and there are no resources for me to "do art." But...

...if I don't find an outlet for all this imagination and creativity, I am probably going to go bonkers. Sure, a lot of you will line up to say I've been bonkers for years, and you're probably right. But this is quite a nice kind of bonkers; the kind that prompts beauty and serenity, and invites one's mind to spin stories off the top of images that popped out of the scenes I've glimpsed. Like:

That. There's a game I used to play years ago, when Mom was in her last months and I was, frankly, climbing the walls with grief and anxiety, not even admitting that I, myself, was seriously ill (and due to land in hospital for multiple surgeries only ten weeks after Mom passed, in 2017). I would slap together five or ten completely unrelated images and challenge myself, and other people who played the game with me, to conjure a story that wove together all the images. Mmmm...

It was fun, and it would give me just a few minutes' relief and release from the burden of reality. Now, I'm not going to tell you that Dave and I have reached that point yet. We're still fighting this thing. But we're also told that there is no way back from this beast that has sunk its claws into him, and all we can do is buy time, days, weeks, months that are to be cherished before it gets ... ugly. Well, we'll see about that. But the spectre is there in the back of your mind most of the time. Hmmm.

All of the above comes down to an inescapable bottom line. I need to find a way to "get out of myself" for long enough to hold onto my sanity. It cannot be art per se: as I said before, there is neither time nor energy for proper art. And as for writing -- same story. I'm an editor now. A good one. I enjoy it, and I do it well. But as for writing? No energy. You might not realise how much energy it takes to write coherent, luminous, emotionally rewarding fiction. Those days, if they ever return, and I hope they do, probably belong to a relatively distant future. But --

I can negotiate with an AI to winkle some of this creativity out of my beleaguered brain. And this is the part that AI has to play. Call it therapy, if you like. It relaxes me. It "takes me out of myself," and for just a short time I can forget, or almost forget, the beast that is lurking in the shadows. So...

...so let's visit alien worlds. Let's travel to other times and places. Let's forget who we are and what we must do just to get through one more day. Let's embrace AI for what it is: therapy. And no, I am not claiming that I painted any of these images! I didn't. You know me better. I hope, than to think I'd tell porkies of that magnitude! The most I did was put the images into Photoshop, adjust the colour balance, gamma, saturation, erase some "artefacts," and add lens flare.

I enjoy working on Photoshop -- always did -- and it's quick, once you know how to drive it properly. But 99.5% of this visual material, today, is right out of the AI, given some pretty smart prompts from yours truly, to get close (or close enough) to the images I'd imagined, to accept the result and smile. Like this:

Now, that's just neat, and it took about three minutes. The AI I'm using is mostly Imagen_4, which is accessed via Google's Gemini, plus, occasionally, Image-fx, also from Google. The images are better than those from Bing, and also Google doesn't "play silly buggers" with points that are traded for the privilege of making a picture -- points you have to buy or earn by patronising Microsoft in some way. Got no time, no money, and zero desire to faff about, guys. Google just gifts me the freedom to make pictures when I have some free time, and when inspiration is burning...

So let's hang onto sanity while Dave and I get through this, however we get through it. And in the meantime, let's go places and do things through the medium of images that I can create, via the alchemy of AI. I've embraced it. It has its place: it is serving me. It is going a long way toward saving me. I've changed my signature line to read "Jen's AI Imagination," which is utterly candid and honest. So let's see where Imagen_4 and Image-fx take us. (To reach Imagen_4 you just go to gemini.google.com and type in, "Create an image..." and then describe what you want. To use Image-fx, you would go to https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx, and follow the prompts. Gemini's Imagen_4 is so easily that a five year old could use it. The other is more ambitious. I leave it to you to choose your favourite.)

It's been a long road, but I'm still here, and there's news

This was a thrill ... in fact, the whole project has been a blast. Mike Adamson's Tales Of the Middle Stars anthology has just been published, and it was by tremendous pleasure for me to provide the interior illustrations, while Italian artist Luca Oleastri provided the cover. I also edited the whole collection, which was another kind of pleasure, and seeing the book go on release today -- hardcover, paperback, and ebook ... well, as I said, what a blast. 

I can't recommend the book highly enough, and not merely because of my involvement. It's a luminous collection of stories that embody what I, personally, think of as "science fiction." This is SF as I prefer it ... as I fell in love with it as a child. In this work, there is an enduring sense of wonder even while this is fiction written from an adult perspective, about a tough, unforgiving universe seen through adult eyes. Please do check it out. 

In the last week, I've also invested a lot of time working hand-in-glove with Mike to bring his website up to date (ah, the old days when I used to write code for a living...! Way back when, before there were website creation programs that did the job for you. I just dated myself, didn't I?), and again, I'd like to invite you to go over and take a look. It's ostensibly a writing website, but it's one of the most visually exciting sites I've ever seen, with so much art, colour, and old-fashioned verve.

Mike also invited me to place a gallery page of my own on-site there, so -- how could I resist. The result is "The Artist" page, tucked away on the The Worlds of Mike Adamson, and I have to say, it's beautiful. "Thrilled" is an understatement. It looks like this:

...and by far the hardest thing about it was choosing a tiny handful of images to "speak for me" across more than a decade of work. I might go back and swap them out every couple of years, to give more pictures an airing.

The book and magazine covers in the right-side column are the publications in which I've appeared as a writer ... and on that score, I have a little news to pass along at last. 

What a great pleasure to be able to report that Falling will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction, probably some time in 2026. 

This one was a lot of fun to write, and for the first time I was able to "go play in the Jovian system," with  FIFO worker on the assignment to end them all. Fly in, fly out work is one thing ... but when the flight to and from the job is a year old, it's a life-changer. In Falling, the central character is out there for the best and worst of all reasons: money. Without it, everything falls apart, yet the quest to earn it is not conducive to family life. And yes, our hero is left a partner and child back on Earth. What's a mother to do?

This story had been in my mind in one form or another for some time, but I'd usually pictured it as taking place on Mars. The thing is that I've written so many stories set on Mars that -- 1) I didn't want to identify myself as "that writer who only writes about Mars," not to mention -- 2) I felt as if I needed a challenge. Get out of the familiar environment (which is almost a witticism) of Mars and make a foray into the Badlands. And they don't come much "badder" than Jupiter. So...

Much research later, Falling found itself completely restructured. The central character changed from being a detective assigned by the department on Earth to investigate a murder in the industrial south of our neighbouring world to being an engineer working with the heaviest heavy industry imaginable. And the stage on which the story plays out shifted from the aforesaid Martian industrial wasteland to the upper atmosphere of a giant world that really, seriously, wants to kill you. Result: a story with which I was extremely happy. 

And the cherry on the cream is that this one will be appearing in ANALOG Science Fiction in a year or so. It's always a thrill!

Next: back to the very serious job of editing, with two major projects ahead of me for Mike and after both books are delivered, he and I will be collaborating on a novel...

And on a personal note, visitors to this blog might be wondering where I disappeared to, about nine or ten months ago, vanished without trace. Was it my own health breaking down again? No, not this time. In fact, it was my husband. The "indestructible" Dave turns out to be far from indestructible. We've known for about the last eighteen months that something wasn't right, but in September 2024, it was time to go to the doctor, face a battery of tests, and find out what it is, and how bad.

Well, it's not good. In October last year, they gave him two years to live. 

Let that sink in. Naturally, I had bigger things to think about than a hobby with art. There were things to do, challenges to be defeated, a new way of thinking to be embraced. Nine months later, here we are. Dave is still with us, but ... but ... but ... You know how it goes. The future is in flux; nothing can be guaranteed, we take nothing for granted, and I don't (can't) make promises about what I'll deliver next year. Will I get back to doing art? Possibly. Maybe. The truth is that my art lies very much under Dave's shadow, and anything remotely like CG work will bring back so many memories, it may be so exquisitely painful that I just can't do it. Short answer: I don't know. I'll continue to write; this I can promise, because that's something I've done since childhood. But few visitors to this blog come here to read. 

Future art might be about embracing AI because I have no access to computers powerful enough to do CG work. Or it might be about sketchpads, pencils and paint. Who can say? For the moment, my time belongs to my dear husband of many years, and every day is precious. Wish us well, and cross your fingers. Science may come to the rescue with a cure, in the nick of time. I always did say that Dave had the luck of any ten people all added together. Okay -- let's see that luck work for him, for us, again.