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July 7, 2024 · 2:21 am

Picsart

This self-portrait of me is made from several of my old selfies fed through the Picsart AI Photo Editor app.

It is my way of getting to Florida in spite of my health problem and ill fortune. Picsart synthesized a picture of me in front of an AI-Generated background. Picsart is not really intelligent. The app creates an image based on what you put into it. It can generate images in the same way that other infamous AI art apps do it, scraping images from the internet, mixing it all up,, and rawlfing out a picture based on a sentence or phrase. But it also works as a very good Photoshop program, allowing you to remove backgrounds, isolate images, paste them in new surroundings, and adjust colors… far better than the cheap-o little Photoshop clone I was using before.

I can take a colored pencil drawing (which is increasingly hard for me to do) and put it on computer to use digital tools.

I can draw and color more easily on a touch screen with a stylus, once I learn all the computer controls.

I can finish the drawing by hand and put in a background that matches the style of my drawing using Picsart Smart Backgrounds. But you can see the creeping crudity of my hand-drawn work. So, I can also go back and put it together again with even more AI help.

I can use AI Mirror to put the original drawing through a realistic anime style format that redraws my drawing, including all the flubs that AI is heir to. Crooked fingers, changing the gender of the subject, shrinking the nose, crossing the eyes, and a total misunderstanding of clown paint.

Using Picsart again to put in the Martin Bar and Grill background.

And then I make final corrections with the digital pen and paintbrush to turn Francois back into a boy wearing clown paint while he sings sad songs.

And so, as I get more and more familiar with the things I can do with Picsart, I let it turn me into a Jimmy Buffett clone again, sending me back to Florida where my heart is this weekend.

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Tagged as ai, challenge, digital art, fashion, photography

October 5, 2014 · 5:47 pm

Foreshortening

When something is nearer in the picture, it appears bigger than those things that appear farther away. This is called foreshortening. It is artists’ jargon for the kind of superhero pictures that Jack “King” Kirby always used to do on the covers of Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Captain America comic books in the 60’s and 70’s. The hands that reach out to grab you. The fists or the gun-barrels that rush toward you. These are the things I must draw bigger than the anatomy or the scenery that comes behind. So let me try that with novel ideas.

Snow Babies is being published as you read this. Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that novel; A blizzard so terrible that omens of death by freezing begin appearing, descends on a small Iowa farm town, and four young runaways on the Trailways bus must find shelter of more than one kind.

I have gotten Superchicken ready to be submitted to a publisher. Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that; A boy moves to a small Iowa farm town where he doesn’t fit in and is treated as an outsider, but before he can feel like he truly belongs, he must learn about himself and the super powers he has always had inside him.

The first draft that I have just finished is called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. This is the foreshortening for that; A genius inventor has lost his wife and son to a lab accident, so he must come to terms with the dangers inherent in science as he tries to heal himself by making friends with the gifted boy who lives next door.

If you are a writer and have written a book or two, can you do a foreshortening on that story? I would be fascinated to hear about it, even if it takes more than one sentence.