Tag Archives: art

December 15, 2023 · 4:33 am

I Am Nobody

I admit to using AI art programs to help me create artwork. But I am not letting AI generate drawings for me. I use AI to add effects and details that my arthritic hands can no longer create. I have been drawing blue-skinned Nebulons for forty years. This picture is my drawing even though the AI finished it (except for the mouth and nose, which I had to redraw to finish this.) In fact, I drew and redrew this particular picture about ten times, something I can do digitally that ink and colored pencil on paper doesn’t allow me to do. One shot is all you get at the process the old way of doing it, unless you spend hours pixel editing with Photoshop. So, I am finished apologizing for the shortcuts I have been taking to make art since I took up digital tools. I get to call myself an artist no matter how offended other artists are becoming with the use of the AI crutches I take advantage of.

I might point out that whatever copyright violations are being done by AI art programs, that is not what I am doing. I am using digital art tools and an AI app that I am feeding my own artwork into. And the corrective decisions are made by me. I am drawing well more than 90 percent of the drawings myself.

But I don’t know why I keep feeling like I have to defend what I am doing. I have been drawing and redrawing and doing art for at least 62 years. And I have never made any substantial amounts of money for anything creative I have done outside of a classroom where I was the teacher.

Why do I worry about my own making of art anyway? I am nobody. Nobody will ever hang any of my work in a gallery. I have never been a commercial artist. I have only been paid a pittance for published cartoons a few times, and royalties for novels and essays a few times more. It never bothered me when I was teaching. I got the feedback I needed from students as I showed them the processes and techniques of being both a good reader and a good writer. I knew from them that my writing abilities were good and were teachable. I had student writers who won writing contests. I took on State tests and achieved writing scores for entire grade levels that were better than the English departments of the small towns around ours. I got real praise from more than one superintendent. I was an English department head and a Gifted Program coordinator. If I ever was somebody, it was then… doing that.

They told me in writing classes at both Iowa State and the University of Iowa that I would probably one day be a published author, and that I was a talented writer with considerable skill. Well, I’m a self-published author now. One that practically nobody reads. But the ones that do read my books seem mostly to like them, or hate them for spurious reasons in two cases. And I guess that is good enough. Good writers in the past have been ignored until after they were gone. I may remain ignored forever. But the important thing is that my art and my writing exist. For now. And maybe in people’s memories too for a while after that. Art needs to exist for its own sake, Its own secret purposes. And it was only my place to create them, not follow them to their ultimate purpose.

Whatever. I am nobody. And that’s okay. Nobody is really more than that in the long run.

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Tagged as art, drawing, inspiration, poetry, writing

December 14, 2023 · 1:37 am

Artificial Intelligence and Art

I began this post with a very excellent video that you probably will not watch, but I found it fascinating and it, in fact, inspired everything I want to talk about in this post. It is about the AI art programs that are running amok in the art world. I am, after all, an artist. Specifically, I am a storyteller and cartoonist. I know how to draw. I can prove it.

Here’s the proof. This is an original oil painting that I did in the 1980s. The only tools that I used to create this picture are a set of oil colors in tubes, a painter’s pallet, three different sizes of sable brushes, a pencil, and a magazine picture of a Vietnamese boy’s face. This was done at the height of my skills as an artist. But I also have to admit that I was diagnosed with arthritis in 1974 after painting the family home’s exterior. Now, 49 years later, the length of time the disease has been gnawing at my joints, I don’t quite have the same sophistication and ability as an artist, a creator of images. That is why digital art tools have been such a boon to me.

This is a colored pencil drawing I created in the 1990s. It is modeled on a young Hispanic boy who lived in the same apartment complex as I did. He was not green. At least I don’t think my color blindness was that bad back then.

I loaded the original drawing into the Drawing Pad digital art program. I put a layer on top of it in my touchscreen phone. I then basically traced the original drawing using the digital stylus that I bought to use in place of a pencil, pen, or paintbrush. I used it in pen mode first to draw the outline. You can see how much it was simplified. This made it easier to do on the small screen I had available on the phone despite my arthritis. I then used the stylus in watercolor paintbrush mode to color in the face and hair. I changed the eye color so I could do the eyes more consistently with a manga-cartoon style of softening levels of color. It gives it a more liquid and realistic look.

So far, I have shown you proof that I can draw well even now with the arthritis affecting my fingers.

Now let’s talk about the Artificial Intelligence programs that have been released into the internet to eventually take away the rulership of this planet and keep us monkey-people in zoos for the amusement of the computerized mega minds that will replace us as the dominant force of civilization on this planet.

AI art programs like the infamous Dall-E programs allow you to write a short description of the artwork you want to see, and the program generates something randomly to fit your descriptors. It pulls from a database scraped from the internet at large, including all the artwork I have posted here on my blog, Instagram, and Pinterest, and adds it all to a dataset that allows it to recognize, interpret, and produce something that conforms to what you have asked for even though it pays no artist any royalties or user fees for drawing from other artists’ artworks.

I promise I will never use an AI program to do that. If you see my name on any artwork like that, then I am dead and being impersonated by an AI entity.

Here is the only way I use AI to aid me in the making of artwork. It is a program called AI Mirror. You give it a photo or a png of an artwork and it redraws it in a specified style.

This is an artwork that I did earlier this year in colored pencil. I was not satisfied with my arthritis-impaired ability on this project. The eyes were too owlish and dark. The lips are too dark and thick. But you can’t erase colored pencils and ink on paper and fix things as easily as you can digitally on a touch screen. So, I used the AI Mirror to correct it.

I used the AI Mirror to fix it in stages like this, simplifying and redrawing it like this first. And then advancing it to this.

This is the finished project, simplified and made more elegant with digital tools.

You can argue that my final product is not better than the colored pencil original. But I like the fact that the AI and the digital tools allowed me to correct what I didn’t like.

The problem with AI art programs, which probably won’t be the ones that outsmart and replace humanity, is that they do so much for you that you are no longer an artist if you use them. So, I guess that I am saying I think that I am an artist, however wrongly, while using these programs because I put the work in both before and after using the AI application. My fear is since nobody sees me as an artist or hears me as a writer anyway, that my art and my stories will be snowed under a mountain of AI generated schlock that is certainly no better than my schlock, and inferior to my best stuff.

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December 7, 2023 · 2:01 am

The Rest of my Classroom Gallery

Here’s what’s left in my camera from school white boards and lessons.

There you have it, the results of 31 years of doodling on the chalkboard (which became the dry erase board). And yes, I did tell them the cartoon fairy drew all the pictures. Especially when they were in my class for the second or third year when they asked, “Who does all the pictures on the board?” And yes, I started doing this back in dinosaur days in white chalk on a green blackboard, followed by colored chalk, which later became a gray marker-board for washable marker, and finally became dry erase white board. And I really bought my own chalk and markers too. Teachers do that, you know.

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Tagged as art, books, cartoons, chalk board drawings, education, food, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, poetry, teaching, travel, white board art, writing

December 4, 2023 · 1:44 am

Homely Art – Part One – Thomas Kinkade

These images can be found at http://thomaskinkade.com/

I honestly have a thing for artists that critics hate and common folk like my parents and grandparents loved. Norman Rockwell is a bit like that. He enjoyed commercial success as a magazine illustrator. That is about as far from avant garde art as you can get. But what can I say? I don’t call myself an artist. I am a cartoonist and all around goofball. I don’t do serious art. So the questions surrounding Thomas Kinkade bounce off my tough old non-critical hide like bullets off the orphan of Krypton. I love his pictures for their gaudy splashes of color, his way with depicting puddles and water of all sorts (splashes of splashes), and his rustic homes and landscapes of another era. This is a man who does lovely calendar art and jigsaw puzzle art. He is roundly criticized for factory production of “original” oil paintings which are actually a base he created and made a print of painted over by an “assistant” artist or apprentice. But I don’t care . I like it. And you used to be able to see his originals without going to museums, in art stores at the shopping mall. He is unfortunately dead now. For most great artists, that makes their work more valuable and more precious. Kinkade’s art hangs in so many homes around the country already that his fame has probably already reached its peak. Look at these works that he did for Hallmark and Disney and various other mass-market retail outlets. I dare you not to like it.

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Tagged as art, art criticism, Art my Grandpa loved, homely art, Oil Painting, Thomas Kinkade

December 2, 2023 · 2:54 am

Art from Mickey’s Digital Obsession

I love the fact that I can so easily turn old pen-and-ink drawings like this doodle into a digital art masterpiece. All I had to do is trace the old drawing on the touchscreen with the digital tools available to me now. My electronic stylus and the free drawing app make re-inking the old drawing like a painting. The brush, line, or effect that you lay on the old drawing takes only a swish of the stylus. And it is so much cleaner and more stylish than the old way of inking a pencil drawing with a ballpoint pen.

Take for instance this digital drawing called “The Skinny Dipper.” It begins as a simple drawing filled with color. And then you can layer details over and under, blend in more colors, shapes, and shadows. It can become much more detailed and realistic. I used a photographic background under it, and then continued to make it an original drawing by painting over both the figure and every detail of the background.

And it didn’t stop there. I gave the boy, or possibly girl, a scuba suit to preserve his or her modesty and allow a deeper dive.

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July 28, 2022 · 3:55 am

Homely Art – Part One – Thomas Kinkade

These images can be found at http://thomaskinkade.com/

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Tagged as art, art criticism, Art my Grandpa loved, homely art, Oil Painting, Thomas Kinkade

January 26, 2022 · 12:59 pm

Loish

I want to talk about a living artist for a change. I know that the artists I have talked about on this goofy blog-that-doesn’t-seem-to-know-what-it-is-really-for, Norman Rockwell, William Bouguereau, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Fontaine Fox, and Maxfield Parrish, are all quite dead. But conversely that is a good thing because it means their art has stood the test of time. But today I want to plug a working artist I find absolutely fascinating. This is the first artist I ever seized upon as an example of a true master whose chosen medium is primarily digital art.

This is Loish. You can find her at http://loish.net/ or http://http://loish.deviantart.com/. Her name is Lois Van Baarle and she is a Dutch citizen by birth. She has worked as both an animator and a commercial artist/illustrator. She has lived all over the world in countries like France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States, but currently resides back in her home country, the Netherlands. What I find so absolutely engaging about her work is the way she can portray ordinary folk, particularly young people and female people, in luminous digital colors (almost as if she is painting with light… and in fact that is actually what she IS doing), and in such a big-eyed, cartooney way (the way you would expect someone who does animation to do it.) Take a look at all these wondrous creations that I have borrowed from her websites or her Facebook page.

Isn’t that some of the loveliest artwork you’ve ever seen? I know some may not like it, preferring what is more realistic, gritty, hard-edged, or more cutting edge… but I love foofy art of all sorts… goofy foofy girly art… and this is among the best I have ever seen.

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Tagged as art, art criticism, artists I like and admire, digital art, illustration

July 25, 2021 · 3:56 pm