I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.
One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.
An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.
Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.
I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.
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.
This is an all-felt recreation of my picture of the Girl with the Green Eyes. It was simply a matter of running my digital picture through the AI Mirror Felt Filter which used its special AI magic to transfer every part of the image into a needlecraft-looking thingy made of what appears to be felt. But no beaver pelts were chewed on to make it. It is a brief look at what the incredibly single-minded magic of AI can actually do. And I would like to submit more of my artwork to this filter, but that would cost money to use it. That’s the thing about AI. It is meant to generate lots of money for somebody… and that somebody is not me.
I enjoy using digital and AI tools to draw. Arthritis and color blindness and muscle spasms have been leeching away my art abilities. These tools make drawing easier and not only restore my drawing ability, they help me go beyond what I have done before.
This gives you an idea of what I used to be able to do, drawing freehand and blending colors with colored pencils. I have been told by friends and family familiar with my older artworks that they prefer my old style to the new anime-style, AI-filter digital stuff. And I understand that sentiment completely. I wish I still could do that.
This is an example of the very best I can do the old way that is also done this year. The colors are no longer fully blended and solidified. It hurts too much to put enough layers on to achieve the solid colors and the blends. My hands no longer manage the repetitions of small lines in layers.
This is about an hour’s worth of work on the digital drawing pad. You can see the basic design and you can also see the splotches and glitches caused by arthritis. I did take it further before applying the AI Mirror art editor, but the flaws are not gone until the AI cleans them up completely.
Here it is after the first application of AI Mirror.
Then clothing is added. That, of course, needs to be cleaned up too and a background added.
And I reach an endpoint that satisfies my need to draw and create. Picsart AI Photo Editor inserted the background.
I know there is way too much AI artwork out there on the web. Much of it is downright lazily created and awful. I hope mine isn’t too. But I have seen things that are masterfully done which reveal possibilities of using AI tools in very artful ways. I am not satisfied with AI art on the internet. But I don’t believe we are wasting our time completely either.
I find this to be a beautiful picture worth the time spent creating it. It is a digital doodle. That means I started with a simple doodle out of my head.
This is the original start, laid down on my computer tablet with a stylus and a digital art program called Drawing Pad Sketch Desk. It is a simpler drawing program than most digital artists use. My daughter recommends Krita. That is far more complex and sophisticated than I was ready to start with.
This is the rather ugly doodle scratched out with layout colors and basic shapes. Had this been colored pencil on paper, I would have wadded it up, shot it into a wastebasket, hopefully for three points, and started again. But the digital pad allows infinite and complete changes.
After fixing and fixing and fixing… and adding a rose in the hair… and something green to match the eyes, I came up with something I wanted to create a finished project out of. I did not take a screenshot of every little change, so you must imagine how I got here from Miss Ugly Puss.
Because of arthritis in my hands and creeping color blindness in my eyes, I use AI Mirror to reprocess my drawing and offer clean-up solutions. I don’t really like the rose that the program made out of my original drawing, so I changed it before the final. Then I used the Picsart AI Photo Editor to supply a background of roses. Thus, I reached the picture you see in the first Paffooney I posted here.
This leads you to my most recently published book on Amazon. A book full of evil poems that may effect your mind and heart, though hopefully in a good way. Black Magic via incantation.
I have paid for a subscription to the Picsart AI App. What you pay for you need to use. So, I am experimenting with it now. I created the above picture with the old method of the digital Drawing Pad app on my computer tablet touchscreen using my electronic stylus on battery power. I then improved the picture by running it through the AI Mirror app to turn what was basically a tracing over a photograph to turn it into an anime-style cartoon.
I used Picsart in Photoshop style to remove the background and place the figure on a new background.
I then used the same figure on a third background. Voila! one small skill mastered.
This one is again using the drawing pad and AI Mirror. I did however draw this skinny dipper myself rather than tracing him from a photo. The background was from a Tap Color Pro puzzle I finished early this morning and drew the figure and bird on top of… also removing the dock behind him. I used AI Mirror only once I had the whole rough draft finished.
I continued fussing with it until I got tired. I was going to manipulate it with Picsart too, but my eyes and fingers got tired, and I had gotten frustrated enough with small finger problems and white lines in the creek that I simply cursed the AI Mirror and ended with this one above. But I have about eight in-between saves where the bird was still a cardinal and I wasn’t satisfied with any of them. AI programs enhance what I can do in digital drawing. And making changes is so simple it spoils me. But the whole process eats up time and energy greedily. And now I am exhausted.
I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.
One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.
An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.
Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.
I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Catch a Falling Star 