Oh Hey, a Blog
I needed a place to rant and ramble, mainly about the goofball projects I've been working on. Medium and Substack seem too... professional? Needy? Like, places for aspiring writers to grow an audience and monetize them. Bah! None of that for this fella.
Check out the cute lil' pancake hermit AI whipped up. Sorry if you hate AI. I'm already bored by it, yet gobsmacked by the visual fidelity and sometimes surprising wit, even as everything it seems to produce has a commoditized sameness to it. It's adorable (or nightmarish), but I don't love it.
I have art books I've been hoarding since I was a kid. And a vast collection of children's books from the late midcentury through the early 80's. I love them. I don't draw or paint myself, so AI images don't fill me with dread in quite the same way as they might a professional artist. If I wanted to draw or paint, I don't think AI would change that. If I wanted to tell stories, the written word, friend.
But I do feel a kind of melancholy, seeing many of my old favorites homogenized in a blender and pooped out into autogenerated artprodukt.
I used to bring books showing the work of folk like Zdzisław Beksinsky and Jacek Yerka in to show the various art teams I've worked with. That was a reasonable thing to do in the late 90's and mid-aughts. Now? Surrealism on tap.
Not sure what happens to art styles and idioms as they become churned into mush. Artists like Beksinsky were clear reference points. Beksisnky is not Max Ernst, Salvadore Dali, or H.R. Giger. He's certainly not Takashi Murakami. Or Mary Blair.
This Goldilocks in the style of Beksinsky and Mary Blair doesn't quite do it:
Is it possible to carve out a novel and recognizable art style or movement just through prompting and curation? Will future prompters use the names of other prompters as coordinates, the names of those who put brush to paper or stylus to tablet pounded into mush?
Here I wanted Jim Woodring. It's a miss. Uncle Jim is safe, for now:
It's got a muddled truthiness to it, though. And that color scheme! Blameless.
AI seems uncannily good at color, lighting, and composition. All the photographs, maybe? Every frame of entire films?
Part of the charm of illustration is what is omitted. The simplicity. The quality of line. Pathos and whimsey. William Steig's pig in a pink bonnet. Victoria Chess, Edward Gorey. Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.
This one has a smarmy, art-sweatshop feel to it. Third-rate Disney knockoff. Too much detail. Too heavy. The basic storytelling is there, but strange gestures and facial expressions. It lacks whimsy.
A plea for minimalism produces something like clip art:
I'll hang on to my old art books just a little bit longer.
