manipulator of pixels...

I am not a photographer. My work, while occasionally from photographs is primarily digital painting and/or manipulation; mostly based on my own pieces or textures, but occasionally including stock, either purchased or open source, textures, overlays or image fragments.

I use Affinity Photo, Photoshop, krita, Studio Artist, ProCreate, icolorama, Mirrolab, Glitchlab, Dream by Wombo and others.

Invites: I am open to invites, but I get a lot of invites to groups where my work is not a good fit.

Please do not invite to groups where my work is clearly out of place. (where there is nothing on the first page that looks like it...)

Please do not invite to groups only for photographs, unless the piece is tagged "photobased."

Please do not invite a piece to more than half a dozen groups at one time.

Absolutely do not invite me to every group to which you happen to be an admin with no thought what-so-ever to whether they fit.

If you are going to invite me to a private group that I am not yet a member of, please invite me to the group as well, so I can see the content.

When Robert Hughes wrote "Shock of the New," his point was that throughout the history of art since the Renaissance, the art world has been repeatedly rocked by innovations which initially have been scorned and rejected, many of which went on to become mainstream. Impressionism, Photography (yes, photography was going to be the end of art,) Fauvism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art and now AI assisted/generated art. Whatever your opinion on AI art, (or for that matter, my opinion of much conceptual art,) it is the epitome of what Hughes meant when he referred to the shock of the new.

Process description for AI assisted pieces:

AI assisted, Dream by Wombo. Finished in Affinity Photo and Photoshop.

I use input files for my pieces, and I generally put more emphasis on the input file than the prompt. I frequently modify the prompt or change it entirely as I work to get closer to what I'm looking for. I don't try to keep track of my prompts.

I also frequently get into repeated variation runs with Wombo's variation option. This does tend to move the results closer to the text prompt.

In terms of influence level the image input has on the piece, I vary from the medium to the high setting. Different inputs produce very different results. Sometimes the high level is either too much or the results are too similar. I run through many of Wombo's filters, but I do have favorites. Some work much better with my post-Wombo processing than others.

Post-processing: Currently, I am enlarging the original Wombo exports to 300dpi -- 3900x5700ppi (13" x19") poster size. The actual enlargement is done in Affinity Photo; however, there is considerable work both before and after enlargement in Photoshop to prepare the image lines etc. to work well with the larger profile. Specific to the enlargement, I use PS paint filters and sometimes smart sharpening (you need to be careful with this though) before the enlargement. Afterwards, I'll take the piece back into PS for additional paint filter and sharpening as well as color work. I then do framing and final finish work in Affinity Photo.

Finally, Kritta is fantastic for producing layered paper and canvas textures.

Update 7/24: I haven't updated this for a while. At this time, I am running a lot of my Dream picks through One Lab, and then using One Lab exports as inputs for Dream. One Lab is similar to iColorama, but for Android. In addition, Photoshop Generate Beta was recently released. It accepts text input with a reference image. I've been playing with that some, but find I have less control, so far, in terms of what comes out than I have learned to produce from Dream. My process with PS Gen at this time is to use a reference image from previous work; then run the best outputs through One Lab; then run the One Lab outputs through Dream; and then finish with Affinity and PS. I've also been experimenting with rather vague text prompts (often surrealist quotes or paraphrases) - a sort of garbage in approach to see what happens as the AI attempts to make sense of the input. This is a process I learned through my writing. Back in the day, some poetry workshops would use a process of running text through multiple languages in Google translate to produce text and ideas for work. After a while, Goggle translate became good enough that this was no longer effective, as even after going through multiple translations, the text out was very similar to the text in. I thought "what would I get as output if the text input in doesn't make sense, and Google translate attempts to make sense of it?" I developed a process where I'd use an anagram generator to produce numerous anagrams of a phrase. I'd then randomly arrange the most interesting anagrams as a poem and feed it through twenty or so Google translations, then edit the output. This is similar to my "garbage in" thinking with the AI art generators.

All my pieces are copyrighted yada yada yada...

my groups:

www.flickr.com/groups/out-of-chaos/

www.flickr.com/groups/14789650@N23/

("just because it's ugly, darling, doesn't mean it's art..." Diane Di Prima)