Celebrating again. Whoot!

 

Art as a reward for work done, if you remember ... art, also as a celebration when something wonderful happens. Something just did -- in fact, I'm still grinning like an idiot, as I said to an acquaintance on FB.

We're almost up to the one-year mark after the diagnosis from hell, where I was told my husband of twenty-six years had two years to live if he was very lucky. (Yes, I melted down. Yes, 2025 has been the year from hell.) We have fought this thing very hard indeed, and --

-- after a year of unremitting effort, we've just been informed (by his official neurologists) that in the last three months there has been zero deterioration in his muscle strength, no weight loss, and no change in the "markers" that measure how the condition is supposed to progress from diagnosis to disaster. So ...

... safe to say that the condition has been completely arrested at this moment. Call it remission, if you like. Call it whatever you like, the bottom line is that if we can keep on doing what we're doing, and maintain this status quo, then we can sail on indefinitely until --

Well, you know what we're waiting for. The scientific breakthrough; the therapy that goes into human trials. And Dave is at the forefront of this -- already known locally as the "poster boy" for the fight against this condition -- so that he gets chosen for those human trials. And then the new therapy works. 

This is what we're hanging on for, and the truth is (fact!) we're doing it. We must be doing something right because, statistically, 70% of people with this diagnosis are gone in the twelve months after said diagnosis, and life expectancy is 6 - 36 months after the onset of symptoms. Well, Dave is waaay past the three year mark, and he's still eating, talking, walking, driving, riding his bike (pedal-assist ebike: takes a lot of effort; you do not just sit on it and open the throttle. It isn't like a motorbike), he's sleeping well, has a good appetite, he's not losing weight, and he's not losing strength. In fact, I see muscles reappearing in his arms. Oh yes, I'm happy. So --

This is the part where we celebrate, and where I use art to reward myself for work done. And make no mistake, the last year has been effing hard work for me. You have no idea. You don't want to know. And yes, yes, yes, this is AI art. Why? Because I'm too ruddy tired to paint or draw or muck about with DAZ and Bryce and Terragen. Too exhausted. The AI is there to help me. Every bit of imagination is still buzzing around in my mind, and you know full well that in a normal year I would be painting and staging these scenes. At the moment, no can do, and yet --

-- oh yes, the imagination is still in there, and still thriving. So I decided to just stop whining about AI and let the images come out the only way they're going to at this moment. Now, all; (repeat all) of these images have been Photoshopped to squeeze the most out of them after they were generated by Gemini, so there is a two-level creative process. To begin with, you put your vision into the simplest possible form for the AI, which has the intelligence of a toddler with TBI. Something like this:

A fantasy warrior (he can remind you a bit of Aragorn, or something similar), is sitting under an old oak tree, resting, and he is wearing leather and linen costume, and he has long dark hair, and he has a lovely orange and white tabby cat in his lap, and he is obviously really fond of the cat, and it is late afternoon, and the sunlight is golden, and there are sunrays in the background, and the viewer gets the impression of an ancient statue just in the background that is buried in the earth and covered in moss, and I would like the image to be in "landscape" format at 16:9 ratio, and it should look like a really high-quality photo from an expensive professional camera, and the camera is about ten feet from the warrior, and only about three feet above the ground

The AI will get close-ish -- close enough to give you something to work with, then --

...the comparatively flat image is passed right into Photoshop and it is painted and enhanced, and then painted and enhanced some more. So there is quite a bit of artistic creativity in there, not merely the original inspiration, the imagination, and the ability to convey this to the AI in a manner than will get it to come out and play. You can also crop deeply into a lot of these images:

In this one, I've cropped faaar inside the original image, because a Gemini image is BIG, and its level of detail can be astonishing:

So yes, sure: these are AI images. But at the moment, Gemini is saving my artistic spirit. Without it, I would be slogging through life without letting my imagination off the leash at all, which would just about destroy me. I've come to the conclusion that the many people who are raging against AI are screaming into a hurricane. They have a just cause, and I used to scream right alongside them, but look ... no way do I expect to ever earn money from art! It just is. Not. Going. To. Happen. I don't take money for art, so why shouldn't I use AI to keep my creative spirit alive until Dave and I reach the end of our path ... whatever that end is, and wherever the path has led us. Wish us well. It's his birthday tomorrow, too, and just reaching it is an absolute triumph, so I'm smiling -- and celebrating. Hence, art. 

 

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.)

Okay -- I'll weigh in on this discssion with my ten cents' worth!

It rages on and on and on: AI, and what to do about it? Can it be stopped? Can artists even survive, in the teeth of AI? And it's not just art: Neil DeGrasse Tyson spoke somewhere, recently, with his opinion that AI is going to kill the whole Internet because fake content (news, celebrity videos, politics, obituaries, whatever) are flooding the whole webosphere to the point where, even now, no one knows what to believe. Fast forward a few years, and nobody will believe anything at all ... and that's kaput to the www. So ... what about AI as it appertains to ART, which is where I live and breathe? Here goes. This is my position, for what it's worth.

A LOOK AT PURE AI PICTURES
uploaded at A4/Letter size: please see

Have I used it? Yes. Why? To find out what it was about -- if it had any merit, and if I hated AI, at least I know what I hate, and why I hate it, right? Right. So, what did I learn?

The argument is that AI steals images and just collages them together ... to a large extent, rather true. Or at least, absolutely true of many (most?) of the current engines. So, AI "stealing" images off the internet is real, and rife ... and I hate this, but I also believe it's way too late to stop it now: I'm pretty sure the damage is done, no matter how angry professional artists get --

I read a looooong analysis article about this, late in 2023 (don't have a link, sorry -- just my memory), and there was this one artist going utterly ape about how the work of artists like Boris, Frazetta, Foss and so forth is being (their word) bastardized ... and they showed examples, AND you could see exactly how works from 1950 or 1980 had been subsumed and adapted. No, this shouldn't be allowed to happen, and I'm sure that -- eventually -- some government body somewhere is going to issue a law that stops it, within their sphere of influence. But remember, a US law ain't worth the proverbial hill o' beans in Russia, Thailand, Philippians, Malaysia, Pakistan, whatever. AI engines only have to move offshore, and the only thing the lawmakers could do would be to block US users from getting onto those servers. That legislation would take another five years, by which time, there'll be a workaround to fool the system. In the end ... no, I don't see legislation based on or around copyright having much effect. So, what's next?
 
Well, how about we try getting real about this. People have been using tracing paper and cameras to copy and manipulate photos and other paintings since it first dawned on someone to do this. AI collage work is not very much different from what we've all done for more years than one cares to remember. So,  for myself ... I don't see much real harm in AI art, so long as it's used as a hobby. But I have to believe it's only a matter of time before legions of artists who wouldn't know one end of a paintbrush from the other start to sell their pictures to unscrupulous (or simply ignorant!) publishers. In fact, what's already happening is that indie publishers are no longer commissioning cover art: they're going DIY, doing it themselves, with the result that people like self  -- who used to earn a few bucks at the boot end of the industry -- don't earn the proverbial brass farthing anymore.

(Yes, I used to be a cover artist, circa 2012 -- paid US$80 per cover, ooooh, aaaah, LOL. The indie publisher I worked for is closed now ... she died. There's no answer to that.)

So, in fact I have two "beefs" with AI art:

1) small-time artists like self are losing the tiny bit of cash flow we used to have -- which means a lot when you're disabled, and the creation of intellectual property if pretty much all you have to work with. And --

2) ...I'm a wee bit miffed, because I worked hundreds of hours to learn digital painting. Each "doodle" in the learning process took ten or twelve hours of work, and left me with pain in the hand, neck and spine ... the learning process was months long, also tortuously slow. Along comes AI, and blows away anything I could hope to do even after 500 hours of learning and practise. So, yeah, I could be pretty miffed if I took myself too seriously. Since it's so damned hard to learn digital painting, and the results tend to be so iffy for so long ... why would anybody ever bother to learn? Why wouldn't they just say, "Stuff it, I'm using AI." So, AI is just becoming another way via which creativity, and raw talent, are being buried. 

Now, having said all that ... I looked at numerous engines just for curiosity. Lexica, Night Cafe, Playground, Wombo, Dreamlike, Leonardo, a whole bunch more. By and large, the results I got on the FREE versions were far too poor to lure me in, and to get anything better -- they want big bucks in subscription fees. Noooo can do. You know what this means: small time artists are screwed on one side, and on the other, the owners of the AI engines are making megabucks. It could be said that they're getting rich off the backs of artists who're out of work now.

Bottom line: AI art is a great hobby, but it has a whole bunch of downsides. And that's my take on all this. If you have a different opinion -- that's fine and dandy. But I know how AI has already affected me, and my artistic future looks a little bit iffy, unless I turn this whole thing into a hobby. Which, I'll be totally honest, is all it is, anyway. Wasn't intended to be, just turned out that way, nudge, wink. So, what's all this digital painting about? Well, this:

...that's all me and my trusty Huion pen tablet. It's fun ... it's original,  creative ... and I'll be damned if I can figure out how to earn a buck with art, LOL. 

Winter comes even to Lothlorien...

 

All digital painting today. Yes, I'm intending (every day!) to start up Studio and get rendering, and every single day I run out of time. There's always some danged thing that comes along to take up an extra hour or so, and push the art project into tomorrow. (What was it today? I managed to smash a full bottle of pure, organic coconut oil all over the kitchen floor. Glass and oil everywhere. Ooooh, boy.) So -- again, the 3D work will get pushed off to another time. 

So here's something a but like a young Aragorn, in the days when he was roaming the land as Strider ... and "Galadriel in Winter." Or, "Winter comes even to Lothlorien." 

There's not much to add ... life is being a Queen Bitch at the moment, but so many people are saying the same thing, I shan't complain. Well, I could, but nobody would be listening --!

So let me sign off here with something that's close to the AI original ... painted somewhat, so it's worth signing off on it, but -- did I create this from scratch? No. I just painted and tweaked the heck out of it. Enough to warrant a signature? Maybe. But I'll be honest, I'm not totally happy putting a signature on something that came out of a machine. I just made the case to a person on an AI group I post to, that I sign off on my stuff so that people know where it came from. Reasonable? I think so...

Something old, something new...

Some is 3D, some is AI, and a lot is painting ... once again, I'll leave it for you to decide which is which! Not much is going on right now ... I haven't had a lot of time to paint, but it would also be true to say that I've done three major editing jobs in the last ten days or so ... which is how one's time flies away.

Lots of painting projects waiting for me ... ideas are hammering at my imagination, desperate to get out. The hardest thing is finding the time for everything. I'll make the time. 

The most interesting piece here, today, is the spin on Leonardo's "Lady With an Ermine," which began life in AI, and had to be massively painted to make anything of it, or rescue it, to the point where it was 70% painting, in which case, yes, I'll sign off on it. (The machine have me some weird, weird stuff ... and as for the creature being an ermine?? It looks like a cross between a small dog and a large rat! Whatever. The machine doesn't know what an ermine is -- or a ferret, a stoat, a weasel ... so, to experiment, I asked it for a kangaroo. Yep, a kangaroo. It gave me a donkey's face (!!!) on which it had overlaid bright red clown makeup!! I was speechless. Also ... disgusted. 

Back to Krita, and painting, I think. 

And on that note, let me sign out for today...!