A lot of critical art viewers will randomly tell me that using AI Art programs is plagiarism because these programs have been trained on people’s posted artwork without permission or acknowledgment. I agree that that is not fair. I also think that is not how I use AI programs. The above picture used Picsart AI Photo Editor and AI Mirror in its creation. The Harlequin Girl is drawn from a model I saw on Instagram, a human dancer in a costume that is similar to my drawing. I used AI Mirror to make my imperfect drawing look better than I can do with arthritic fingers. I used the uncorrected version here with the problem hands so you could see the kind of things you have to go back and draw over with digital art tools. I used Picsart to turn her into what is called a “sticker” that I could place upon a background. I used a colored mandala that I got from Tapcolor Digital Coloring Book as a background. Before I put the sticker on top, I added the butterfly and altered the round design elements into flowers.
This is how I use AI Mirror to improve my artwork. The picture above is nothing but a pencil drawing inked and guidelines erased. If you look at it carefully you can see how I skewed the eyes when I inked the pencil drawing. One on the left is the roundness I wanted. The right one has a lower eyelid that cuts too narrowly to make the eyes look mismatched. So, I ran the photo of the finished pen and ink drawing through AI Mirror allowing it to make changes up to 50 %. Below you can see the best result. It took eight tries to get the eye match I wanted.
You can see that the program made changes to more than just the eyes. It took much of the 50% to adjust the background, adding art tools that I had in previous photos of the drawing board used in similar pictures I used AI Mirror on. It also changed the hairstyle, and since it didn’t like the ladybug theme of the dress, changed it for white roses which I have used in similar pictures repeatedly. I did go back and add whiteness to the roses to make it look a little cooler.
This one above is intended to be a surrealist interpretation of a piece of music. Of course, the AI Mirror program and the Picsart program are both overly sensitive to copyright and trademark. That’s why it intentionally screws up the sheet music and the words on the t-shirt of the drawing I did for the girl sticker. It doesn’t reproduce things that could potentially be trademarked. And the flower stems the girl held in my drawing got turned into a short black stick and a sword? There were multiple things I needed to correct as I continued to change it to make it fit my vision for the piece.
This isn’t a final version either, but it is closer. It still needs to have the sheet music tamed to look more like ordinary sheet music. The main character’s bikini bottom shows up in a way that proves that making it two-color black and brown needed to be more contrasting to the shadow color on her legs. And the nudity of her companion was my idea, but I will have to make the further correction of not sending this post to Facebook. Facebook is ready to sanction me for showing bare breasts in their news feeds.
I am now done complaining about the nagging little things that annoy me about the AI art process. But I do the drawings that I present as my work. I am not plagiarizing anything. And I thoroughly enjoy this whole process.
Catch a Falling Star 