I am impressed by digital art programs. I had my Chromebook set up for making digital pictures. I learned how much easier it is to lay out light and shadow patterns on your original drawing. Blending colors is so much easier with a stylus on a touch screen. And a stylus is easier to maneuver with arthritic fingers than a colored pencil is. And no amount of eraser curds flying in the air fixes a mistake better than a simple back-up click and redo. But of course, before I could make the process start to fly, my Chromebook decided for whatever reason to commit ritual computer suicide, apparently shorting out during a long walk with the dog.
So, I bought an AI-assistant program to help me convert my colored-pencil drawings into digital pictures. But you don’t have control over details to the degree that you would if you were drawing the whole thing with a stylus. The AI has to interpret everything it sees and render it with properly lit and blended colors trying to mimic the patterns you have presented it with. Of course, the AI is stupid and has to be trained. You can’t just edit the details like the finger damage you see above. You have to adjust the amount of control it has to interpret things the way it thinks is stupidly correct. You adjust from 1% to 90%. O% is the same picture you gave it. 91% and above looks nothing like your drawing. And then you re-create the entire picture again with the new percentage and whatever the AI has learned from your picture.
This one looks more like my version of Valerie, but the AI still has work to do on the background, the box of quilt pieces, and making the girl less anime-cartoony.
This is better. Still not there. But better.
I really like the face and hair on this one. Colored rocks in the box? And I would have to remove the writing on the box with a paint program from HP. In other words, a pixel edit.
This one is the best one so far. That almost looks like quilt blocks in the box. The expression on Val’s face is right for the Snow Babies story.
So, I almost think I need to rush out and buy a new Chromebook with touch screen. I can’t wait to have more control over this whole process. Still, I enjoy noodling with this stupid AI.
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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