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.)

Digital painting for the Christmas season, and other goodies

Reepicheep, the Errol Flynn of the mouse world

A 2023 repaint of the 2017 sketch of magnolias, to fix
a number of resolution issues that couldn't be
addressed with the old hardware 

I've been interested, as we run in toward Christmas, to try my hand at designing Christmas cards. Interesting! And along the way, a number of new digital painting techniques have come my way, and I wanted to try them out. The perfect image to go in and play around was Reepicheep ... my take on swashbuckling mouse from the land of Narnia. That was fun -- and the new techniques worked out well. It doesn't matter how long you've been painting, or how many paintings you've done, there's always sooo much more to learn! 

The idea of using AI to create picture elements for compositing and painting, rather than shelling out pots of money for 3D props, is working out, and I have to credit Bing as being the AI to run with at this moment, if your pockets are not deep. Mine aren't, not anymore. My cash flew away and it's proving very difficult indeed to get it back. I can no longer afford the tons of new models and resources to support CG art, so ... here we are.  

There's not much more to report ... but I will say this: my creative juices are starting to flow again, and I have a yen to get back to the story of Trouble, the rescue dragon who needs to go home, across the mountains, when he grows large enough to start making wrecking of the Consulting Mage's house. Enter the delectable Tomas, and Brianna, the mage's human descendants, and a gypsy wagon, the two magickal cats, Shadow and Ginger, and a quest into the west, and a passage through to an enchanted realm where the big dragons live ... all the elements are in place for a lovely story. All I need is the energy to get on and do it!

Pin-up time: a little guy candy for Easter ... any why not?

 

Going back through posts for the last few years, I'm discovering that loads (and I mean loads!) of pictures were never posted here. Time to catch up with that! And then there's new stuff, which is starting to pile up too, while I try to make the time to keep up with this blog. (I also run a writing blog, which is being horrifically neglected ... I've been selling fiction professionally for the last few years; I don't know if I ever mentioned that. 2022 did such a number on me, I'm hopelessly out of date with everything.)

So let me post some pretty things and say "Happy Easter!" 

The dragon is a full-on, 100% digital painting: "Dragon's Dominion." The other pieces are 3D renders which have been re-re-re-repainted, and I have to say, good old Michael 4 never looked so good. He renders well in Iray, and he paints up well in Photoshop. Okay, so he's never going to be as photographically realistic as a Genesis figure, but here's the thing: if you're not looking for photographic results, and are content (nay, happy?) with art, Michael 4 is dead easy to work with. M4 and V4 render very fast, and by the time they're painted and turned into art, I don't see an issue with the fact the work began life as something not-Genesis.

Translation: I'm getting the itch to start up Studio again, and if I can't render the brand new stuff, which won't squeeze into my GPU, then so be it!

Last thing for today: it's AI. I don't know what the heck it it, but I like it a lot. Using Stable Diffusion, I put in the incredibly vague prompt "The Meaning of Life." Gawds alone know what the machine is thinking, but for that prompt, this is what it gave me:

To me, it looks like some kind of alien creature, and it's strangely compelling. Oddly enough, I like it a lot. And on the completely other end of the scale, I painted an Easter card this morning. Let me post it here, wish everyone all the best for the long weekend, and get myself off to bed! Goodnight to all...

An alien hunk, a cyborg, and ... sheer whimsy

It's been a fun day with the Huion pen tablet, as you can see! I'd have to call this "hybrid art" ... mostly it's painting, some is CG, some elements were generated by various engines, and in one instance (and I'll leave it to you to figure out which!) I took the shortcut of using PNG overlays, which I bought from Rendo a few years ago, for this exact purpose, so it's absolutely appropriate to use them: it's what they were bought for, and sold for. 

The Cyborg is the only piece out of the three that I won't claim to have had much of a hand in. It was generated by the whacked out weird Dreamlike.art, I just rebalanced it, touched it up, in Photoshop. I have no idea what it is; I just include it here because in waaaay too much playing around with Dreamlike in the vain attempt to generate a picture element I could actually use, this is the only thing so far that wasn't weird, deformed rubbish with a smashed-in face that looks like it's been hit by a shovel. Some of the faces Dreamlike puts onto figures are beyond horrific...  Not my scene.

The hunky green alien is 50% painting, 50% compositing. 60% me, 40% the machine. Think of it as a "rogue Vulcan" ... you ever wondered what they're like if they let their hair down? If they ever do...

This is possibly the last chance I'll have to post art for a week or so. Dave starts his vacation tomorrow, and although the Limestone Coast trip is history (mechanical problems ... the van is currently standing in a workshop, due for inspection, and we're not even sure we'll get it back. I think we will; hope we will. No guarantees, but ...) we'll still be getting out and about. I've waited half a year for this. Insert eyerollemoji. 

But all vacations come to an end (too soon), and like the man said in the movie -- I'll be back!

The Viking hunk, a Chinese princess, an alien encounter, and dawn in the woods ... painting happily

If anybody tells you that AI generated art is the bee's knees ... don't you believe it. Dream Wombo handed me a lot of rubbish today, but I saw the potential in some of it and spent about seven hours painting the images you see here. AI is a very mixed bag: as a concept, it's not fair to "proper" artists, and at the same time, 90% of the results you get out of it are ... weird. My experiments are almost finished ... horses with five legs? People with seven fingers on one hand? People with two heads? A horse with two torsos? Say, what?!! 

So, I think I'm just about done experimenting. I've learned a lot ... learned what I don't like about AI generated images, as well as what I do like. Some engines are better than others; none is as hot as they're reputed to be, but the best can certainly produce the raw materials to make excellent pictures. 

The one thing I dislike the most about AI (and this is the thing that would/will stop me using it very much) is that it's totally random. You know, in your mind's eye, the image you want. The engine hands you something that's so idiotically different, you wonder what it was thinking. Example: You ask for a teacup with teapot ... it gives you (I kid you not!) a woman with thirteen fingers and flowers spilling out of the left side of her skull, holding a teacup the size of a bucket, while a teapot the size of an oil drum grows out of her left elbow. 

What?!!!!

So, experiments complete. I might play with AI occasionally when I'm totally bored, but I'd prefer to imagine my own images and create them from scratch. Like this one:

  

That was me. All me. Painted in photoshop, after being composited from a couple of my own photos, plus a royalty free image of a deer that was sourced from one of those free wallpaper sites where they make you look at 200 commercials before you get to save a picture. You could also go to Wikimedia for sources, or go to any one of dozens of free image sites. These provide the elements from which a picture is composited, and... I'll be totally candid --

In a week, I've seen enough three-armed, two-headed, fourteen-fingered people, and two-headed, five-legged horses, to last me for several years. Look at this one, on the left. Looks okay at first glance. Count the fingers. Who programmed Lexica to believe that human beings have fourteen fingers?! Soooo...

This is something I'll play with when I'm bored, but for all useful purposes, the only thing I'd use it for is to generate the occasional picture element, when I can't afford to pay a bucketful of money to buy a prop.

Fair to say, though, that AI generated art is in its infancy. Come back in five years and see what's happening in this field. The way computers and software advance, I have an intuition that five years from now you won't be able to tell something that was produced by a machine from something a human sweated blood over, for a week. And that's what worries me the most. In fact, it's worrying the entire creative community -- musicians, writers, artists, the lot of us. Many people can see their livelihoods going away. I'm lucky, I don't have to worry about that. I'm retired, and this is just a hobby...

I like to paint. Like...

The "raw" image showed enough promise for me to paint on it for about ninety minutes. But check out the original raw image ... those eyes are doll's eyes; then, as if that wasn't enough, the computer set his hair on fire!!! And the shoulder of his tunic is going right into his skin. There's no depth to the image, and nothing is "happening" in it. It's good raw material, but as a finished image... nope. Good thing I like to paint, right?! 

Same deal with the Chinese princess. The original offering from Dream Wombo was filled with flotsam and jetsam, the face had weird buttons and bits added in for no reason, and the hair went "wrong" at one side. Took me an hour and a half to rescue that one, too!

Mmmm. Experiments complete. I shall now quit bellyaching about AI, and go back to painting, which is what I like best in any case! I'll try to post more often, too ... I've been neglecting this blog terribly -- 2022 did a number on me (don't even ask), but this is 2023, and almost through to the end of Q1. Time to drive on. So -- here we go. 

Adventures in Krita, and explorations into AI. Gasp!

So ... where have I been for so long? Short version: 2022 "did a number" on me, and although I've started to make the journey back to health and strength, there's a (very) long way to go yet. For the longest time, I wasn't able to do anything much of anything. Then, on top of everything else I got Covid, and took months to throw it off -- the truth is, it's six months later, and I still haven't recovered a hundred percent...

In that time, art and writing have been next to impossible. I think I've written four short stories in the last year; and four items have been published, or are about to be (I just posted to my writing blog, bringing that up to date with scribbling and publishing) ... but writing new stuff? Painting? Rendering? That's been too much to even contemplate, till these last few weeks. Then...

Couple of things: I've gotten my feet wet with Krita. Full-on painting. Soooo much to learn, before I start doing exotic young hunks, (nudge wink) so I might as well learn on cats and owls and flutterflies, right? Krita is a LOT of fun. If you have any interest, it's open source, free forever, and looks (to me) to be just about the equal of things like Corel Paint, perhaps not quite on the same level with Rebelle ... but these progs are prohibitively expensive, while Krita is ... well, it's free. It's Krita.org, as far as I know, not dot-com.

The great news is, the Huion tablet is on and working, and is fan-flipping-tastic. It's making it possible for me to actually sketch and doodle. The squirrel pen and ink image was my first ever foray into the program, and it really is pen and ink. The owl was my first full-on true painting. I need to buy some extra brushes -- acrylic brushes, oil brushes, watercolour brushes, textures. Very soon, we'll be off to the races.

And just as I discover this, along comes the wonderful world of AI. Well, now. The truth is, since  don't have much of a cash flow, DAZ is a bit too expensive for me. All I can do is work with the existing props and sets and costumes, and one has to say, there's only so many ways you can rearrange them before you start to recognise literally every element of every picture. But with AI, it's free, incredibly fast, and amazingly vivid. 

The Chris Foss style heavy industrial spaceship image took minutes. Seriously. Argh. Urgh. You want stuff like this? Seconds, and there is is...

I do believe I have just heard the death knell for many, many forms of art. Unless DAZ can make its product more affordable AND easier to render on systems which real people (not industry pros, or companies chucking around tonnes of money) can afford, more and more people will drift away to AI. In fact, I'm heading in that direction, as well as long, slow, laborious painting in Krita. But I do want to be painting those exotic young hunks, and you do have to start somewhere, so ... here we go. Starting. 

Touching base with pretty things

Touching base in April with images -- not specifically art, but straddling that line where photography and art merge, one into the other. Why? Because my big PC (which handles the 3D art programs) is staggering, and if I try for a long render, it'll croak! Also, it's permanently offline with an uncooperative modem. And I can't get a new system till Christmas! So 3D adventures will just have to wait ... but I do want to touch base at least once a month, keep this blog juuust ticking over, and say hi to everyone, especially when we're all locked down so tight, I know a lot of people are increasingly bored out of their collective gourd! So...

The big news for me personally is that I took the plunge and bought a new camera in February. The bummer deal (and that is putting it mildly) for the whole world is that by the end of March the pandemic was hitting everyone, everywhere; and as a result, I can't take the new camera anywhere until about September! To set your mind at rest --

Dave, Mike and I are in the safest place in the world, in South Australia. This state is starting to see days with zero new cases reported ... SA was able, via stringent measures and public cooperation, to hold the number of cases reported locally to very low numbers (in a state of 1.7m people, most of whom live in the metropolitan area, only 433 people have tested positive by the time we start to see our "zero days." Never more than twenty people, maximum, were hospitalized at one time, and I believe the most people at one time in ICU was six, (possibly seven). There have been four  -- yes, just 4 -- fatalities in this state, but my information is that each them was literally too sick to be rescued after contracting the virus overseas, most often on a cruise ship. One's heart goes out to the families of those four grandparents who, tragically, came home to die ... at the same time, one applauds SA, where -- at least to this point -- no one actually who fell sick here has perished, because medical care is top-notch, free, and fast. At this time, I'm extremely proud to be a South Aussie.

So, where are we at this moment? In lockdown, yes; in self imposed exile ... not taking the new camera anywhere -- being good and "staying home." But in the few expeditions where I had the opportunity to field test it, I was impressed: Leica lens elements, 20.3MP, 1,005mm zoom, far better "register" than any of the Fuji cameras, which all gave very harsh images. I'm loving my Lumix TX90 and -- well, roll on September, when the lockdown lifts and we can go places! We'll be visiting Mount Gambier, Clare Valley ... lots of places. Having said that, at this moment we're all well, and working hard. I'm writing. I've sold four short stories to SF and fantasy magazines, and am working on a second novel. Am also looking forward to the end of the year, and that new desktop PC with the "oomph" to run the demanding imaging programs, but till then...

...well, till then I'll touch base now and then, either with photos or art, even if the art is reposted ... or perhaps a review of an artist, or art book? However it works out, Christmas will be upon us before you know it. Someone said not to long ago, "Once you get past Easter, the rest of the year goes like a shot." Uh huh. Easter was last weekend, and I spent the four-day "break" (a misnomer, because when you're in lockdown there's nothing to take a break from; and Dave had shifts right through Easter) transferring hundreds of Gigs of data to and fro between drives. Now I have access to every digital shot I've ever taken, back to the first 1MP Kodak camera we ever had, in something like 2001. So with every image at my fingertips...

--suffice to say, there's no shortage of images to share! And there is a line where art and photography blur, one into the other. I like to think that I'm riding that line a lot of the time. And yes, this year, like a kid, I'm waiting for Christmas! There will be a post called "Happy New Computer" at some point! Then I'll spend a few days getting everything installed, and we'll get back to 3D art. The wonderful world of Iray. Till then -- have some more photographic eye candy here.

See you in May! (Or perhaps sooner, if some of the art ideas in my imagination that don't involve long renders bear fruit...)