When I started this blog it was to document my journey from being a commercial artist to being a painter of pictures to go in frames. I had thought the transition would be easy, after all, I had skills built up over years of illustration. I tried to set down what I knew here, to help others, but also to sort out what I knew and why in my own head.
You can read the results in earlier posts and see that my journey wasn’t exactly an easy one. There was much about picture making I hadn’t learnt and a lot I had learnt which was wrong or my understanding was flawed. I stopped blogging because I’d covered most aspects and it was turning into an illustrated diary. It’s gratifying that my erratic posts still get lots of hits—the ones on perspective especially so.
Also, I had retired to a cottage in Dorset and was fully engaged in painting and drawing my way around the county. So life was very pleasant and my pictures were selling well. Then, like Alice, a white rabbit passed by.
The first inkling was this:
Jason M. Allen, entered this image in an art competition and won. I thought it was a very strange image but interesting. Reading further I found out it was Ai generated in a program called Midjourney. Also, artists weren’t happy and said it wasn’t art. It was a classic reaction to any new thing. I’d been an early adopter of computer graphics and 3d so I knew what it’s like to be told what you do isn’t art.
This was in 2022 and a year slid by with me vaguely following the controversy. I saw other images from Dalle-e, often of plastic-looking women with no expression, or deranged cityscapes of swoopy sci-fi buildings. I rather liked these, they were reminiscent of the cover art I’d so admired as a twenty year old. Roger Dean churned out by the yard. I tried a few of the sites where you type in “A cat on a bicycle.” and a small image would pop out and wasn’t impressed.
Then towards the end of 2023 I saw there was a free plugin for Photoshop called Alpaca and it said it would turn my drawings into finished images. It was in beta so I thought, ‘Why not?’ Getting it was easy and during the process I ended up with Discord account… but that is a story for later. It presented me with a pretty straightforward interface so I did a simple drawing and wrote a short sentence describing what I wanted. Here’s my sketch.
After a few moments this came back.
Lots of things wrong but somehow it had almost made sense of my squiggles. This was my introduction to the mysteries of prompting. After reading a bit online I made a more focussed prompt. Apparently you had to reference art styles. So I added short description of the girl and put “Cathedral” and “Pixar” in my prompt. The result set me back on my heels.
Not perfect, but half an hour retouch and it could be a finished illustration. A thought surfaced, this was the end for legions of illustrators. Not the stars with the hosts of adoring fans, but the foot soldiers supplying the needs of advertisers and publishers. The many concept artists and storyboard slaves. I very much wanted it to be worse than a human produced image. I tried to convince myself it lacked soul and magic.
Most of my artist friends could manage this sleight of mind seemingly without effort. I have always had trouble with self delusion, not because I don’t delude myself, but because I am too good at it and have to keep it in check. Self delusion is the well spring of imagination, so it has its uses. The images being made weren’t better than the best that humans could make, but they were a lot better than most illustrators could have managed.
There I was. The rabbit hole was open at my feet should I jump down it? First of all I needed to know more. I needed to know how this thing operated. I found a site called Huggingface which had many learned papers with complex equations. I looked at You Tube vids by people who said they knew how it worked but plainly hadn’t read the science or understood the maths. At the same time the press was screaming about deep fakes and how we would all be killed by some malign Ai intelligence who dispensed with old-fashioned humans.
As a young illustrator I’d dreamed of doing Sci-fi illustrations. Once I got good enough to have an artist’s agent the jobs I actually got were romance covers and spot illustrations for Woman’s Own! This, I thought, would be the perfect medium to churn them out. I soon found it was far from easy. The Ai seemed to have a mind of its own. If I tried to constrain it too much I got a mangled mess of pixels, but if I allowed it too much freedom I would get a random image. Here’s a few examples from my early tests.
If, back in 1990, I had offered any of these to an art buyer they would have bitten my hand off. My feelings about this were very mixed but I was hooked now and falling rapidly down the rabbit’s burrow. Like Alice my journey thereafter would be surreal and unexpected.
