Evaluating Picsart AI

I admit to using AI apps to help me draw. Art versus arthritis has become a losing battle for me in the last few years. I have been despairing about the loss. But miraculously the wave of AI crap came along and rescued me from artless misery. I call it crap because AI tends to stand for “Artificial Ignorance” more than “Intelligence.” Generative art programs where you type in a word or phrase and get a picture back are guilty of scraping all the art on the internet to create the poor facsimiles they create. It is more or less plagiarism. They take tiny bites of artist’s work without paying for them and then remix them into “new” art. But that’s not what I do. I take my own drawings and photographs and use AI tools on my own artwork. It sizes up my picture. Assesses what each item is, and then redraws it with an overlay of art style that makes up for the accurate and smoothly executed lines my arthritic hands can’t still do.

This picture is an example of the best I can still do without AI assistance. Yes, it’s pretty good, but you will notice it has none if the intricate shading and color blends I used to be capable of. The green background is not even a solid green. I have lost a lot of drawing command over my hands…

This is what I can manage with the help of the AI Mirror and Picsart AI programs. The girl is drawn with digital art tools, then transformed with the AI Mirror program that turns my drawing into an anime-style portrait of the model’s face. I use pictures of girls I have known, interesting faces from catalogs and Instagram, and even Barbie dolls as models. The background is courtesy of Picsart AI which is apparently mostly a version of Photoshop to combine artwork with photographs. This particular background comes from the free stock photos included in the gallery of the Picsart app, a twenty-dollar-per-year program.

So, now I have four programs to play with and help me make art. The digital drawing apps called Sketch Desk and Drawing Desk, the AI Mirror app, and the new Picsart AI. I have only just begun to create art in a whole new way.