AI and Digital Artwork

I’ve recently been crook with a horrible virus that lingered far longer than was polite It saw me holed up in the den for a couple of weekends with no energy to get anything of consequence achieved.  I’m not one for taking things easy and even when poorly, still need to mentally achieve something in my day.  It was this scenario that saw me embark upon a learning adventure with all things computery!

I have already dabbled with Procreate on my iPad, even purchasing an Apple Pencil to aid with the finer details.  I set myself some challenges with this, significantly to draw like a photograph.  It took me soooooo many hours, but I achieved my goal and vowed never to attempt it again. I’ve drawn the odd thing on it since, mainly designs that I have needed for projects on an ad hoc basis.

I should impart here; drawing is not something I enjoy.  I never have.  When I studied art in my late teens, my college lecturer had a huge battle getting me to complete or even start any drawings.  I had a mental barrier to putting pencil to sketchpad.  On the day of the external examiner coming in to college, my lecturer was furious with my result as I attained a merit, and he considered it wholly unjust.  In terms of effort, he was correct, but in terms of what I produced, apparantly not!  After leaving college, I never drew again for around twenty-five years.  I have some catching up to do these days, but it’s still an onerous task for me.

As part of my MA, I need to draw.  It’s that simple.  I also have access to Adobe PhotoShop, so I decided to try to learn how to use it whilst parked on the sofa sipping paracetamol, hugging tissues and generally feeling meh.  PhotoShop is a huge application with almost limitless potential for all things digital artwork.  For my current project I required some images to send off to print as decals, so it seemed logical to use this as an exercise to learn from.

As previously discussed in another blog, the original artwork for The Owl and The Pussycat was Victorian style pen and ink drawings.  These will no doubt now be out of copyright, but as they weren’t exactly what I wanted for my project, I decided that I’d err on the side of caution and create my own images.  For this, I ventured down another rabbit hole, AI generated images.  I wanted to understand this more and I knew nothing about it.  I used Bing Image Creator and, after many attempts with getting the text correct, I achieved some images.  I cannot say they were fantastic, but they were useable. 

My take home from AI image creation is that it is clunky, and you must be very specific in your search criteria.  Even then, there are errors in the image.  Not the end of the world when you intend to draw from them, as in my case, but none were suitable to print out and stick in a frame.  Additionally, any text included was usually gobbledy-gook.

Having managed to create some images, I then set about using PhotoShop to edit them and make them more what I required.  I learned through trial and error with the odd Googling of how to do specifics.  I can now complete most of what I need on PhotoShop, but I’m far from being an expert.  I can remove backgrounds, resize, change colours, merge images, redefine and reshape and a plethora of other low-level tasks that enable me to produce a completed design.  It was long, slow, tedious and laborious.  Several times I nearly jacked it in or got assistance from a friend who is expert in the application, but I resisted and stuck with my challenge to learn through self-exploration.

When my images were completed, I then took them through Procreate and used the digital pencil to get things a bit sharper if required.

My next task was to cram as many of the images I had made into an A3 PDF format to send to the ceramic printers for my decals.  Again, this took so much time which I didn’t expect, but I got there in the end.

Having learned about AI generated images, how to use PhotoShop, and furthering my skills in Procreate, I achieved a great deal in the two weekends I was ill. I will definitely be able to take these skills forward and utilise them in future design work.  I also learned about creating images for decals which I will definitely use again at some point, I’m sure.  For now, it may actually be nice to drag out my trusty 2B pencil, get it sharpened up and get some cartridge paper to complete a few drawings, but don’t tell anyone…

Photograph

Digital Drawing using Procreate