arcady

It's June of 2023, and the last time I was here was in 2014, but even longer since I had last posted anything. In that time much has changed. The new art is a departure from the old in many ways.

I now do handcrafted AI art.

What is handcrafted AI art?

I've gotten into AI Art with 2023, and have dusted off this ancient account to put up my work.

Just like photography you could 'click a button and get art', but photographers do more. Hand crafted AI art does even more than that.

Well, I make my art in a combo of Stable Diffusion and Gimp. Going back and forth between the two until I get it right.

My general process is to spin out a few dozen images in Stable Diffusion, take some of them into Gimp and mess around cropping things together, removing bits, drawing in a few elements, and so on, then take it back to Stable Diffusion's Img2Img tool that makes new art based on a specific image you give it. I then cycle back and forth between that and changes manually made in Gimp until I have the piece I want.

That's usually a hundred or more passes through each tool with a lot of hand made elements in the mix. If it can be tweaked, I tweak it. Throughout this process I liberally change 'ai prompts' and 'training models', and more between each render so the final result is very much a personally crafted piece.

People dismiss AI Art right now, but I feel that once people understand it more, and learn to work with it in combination with other tools, it will get the respect it deserves, just like Photography once had to do.

There is nothing 'snapshot' or 'automatic' about my stuff. I hope people can see this in particular when they compare the earlier pieces (the Suri Pashi series) and the later images.