After watching a few videos of a supremely egotistical YouTuber (who shall not be named) rattle on incoherently about the use of AI for real art, a new realization has dawned upon me.

1) While the finishing style of such digital illustrations can look nicely rendered, as if by a competent oil painter, those same digital illos. look strangely similar and blah. I was impressed at first, but now it already bores me.

2) Studying to become a photo realist is not the answer to overcoming AI generated pictures. This is a good skill set to have, but it won’t make you ultimately better that AI.

3) What will make your art superior to AI is the “cool” factor. Those little bits of imperfect brilliance that sometimes happen? It’s the opposite of the Uncanny Valley effect, where things look close but not quite right. Instead, It’s where art look real on a deeper level, as if it was more real than real, and the image speaks to the viewer.

4) I realize that this is not an answer for most artists. If we could produce bits of brilliance every time we were in the zone, that would be awesome. Sadly, brilliance comes when it’s ready, and on its own schedule, not ours.

5) Here’s my point. Only people can channel genius and make truly great things. AI cannot channel anything but what has already been feed into its training set. AI has no zone or flow state. AI cannot make a deep, artistic connection or illustrate deeper, universal truths.

6) AI is a great invention, and it will make human lives better in so many fields, especially medicine and science. However, I don’t think it can ever really replace human ingenuity. Copy, represent, or rehash, maybe, but replace it, no.

Today Benita and I watched two Agatha Christie movies, Crooked house, and Death on the Nile. Crooked House was excellent and free on Youtube. Glen Close and Jillian Anderson were in it, and it gets high marks.

Death on the Nile was the Kenneth Branagh version, and I’m sad to say it was not as good. Lots of story deviation. AC wrote a great book, and I didn’t see the need to change it around, but there you go. It ticked Benita off and she now has no interest in seeing more Branagh adaptations of Poirot.

I’m still not sure I’m going to fit in with others on World Anvil’s Discord channel. I’m not an aimless chat person, and I only really engage mentally when the conversation gets relevant to me. I’m sure there is some aspect of those message boards where I would fit in, but I haven’t found them yet.

I found out that Barry Windsor Smith was heavily influenced by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and some of the women that served as his muses. I can see the draw, because I like this art movement in general. More study is forthcoming, I think.

So, I was under the impression that when you mix complementary colors, you get gray. Apparently this is true, except with watercolors. I’ve mixed blue and orange many times for a vibrant gray, but apparently violet and yellow or green and red are not as good for this. In fact, I just got brown tones or tans. I guess this has to do with subtractive versus additive mediums. (No, I’m not ready to explain this yet.)

Let’s just say colors are weird. As yellow tones down, for example, it turns green. Yellow is the weakest color, just as red is the strongest. Red tends to flatten out, and is not as good for layering. Furthermore, you can’t effectively add white, make pink, and use that for red highlights. You can lighten red with water and that will work, but don’t add white.

So far, my favorite recipes for skin tones are burnt umber plus orange plus white. Shift those color quantities for different skin tones and shades. There are other ways to achieve skin tone, such as red + yellow + blue, but that’s a bit trickier.

If you’ve read this far then you are a nerd. Rejoice in that, and hold it close to your heart. Peace.

Thanksgiving is coming to a close, and I have had a lovely day. Benita and I worked on cleaning our downstairs and wore ourselves out. Then we watched a bunch of History in the Making (wonderful show). Our cat has even decided she likes me over the last few days, when previously I thought I had become invisible to her.

I’ve got all the pages formatted for my coffee table art book, and resized the art. It’s going to be 8.5 x 11 and just shy of 200 pages. I’ll be spamming the universe when it’s ready to go on sale. I’ve still got five paintings to finish, so it’ll be a few weeks. I’ll make it available in Kindle, soft back, and hard back editions.

I never wrote a review of GenV, the offshoot show of the Boys on Prime. It tried really hard at being edgy, with excessive gore, some full frontal, drug use, drinking, a bit of sexual deviance, and some other ugly paraphenalia common to what I think of the “bastard superhero” genre.

By Bastard Superhero, I’m referring to the nasty, curmudgeon-like superheroes as written by Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis. These characters tend toward the blunt, violent, unyielding type of hero, or perhaps anti-hero. Almost any of the characters in the Boys fit this bill, as well as those in comics like Planetary or the Authority.

Yet, in the end, despite all the drug culture and porn-like gloss, the characters were really relatable, maybe even downright likable. The show had one major fault in that the kids were smart and struggling with ethics, while the adults were sold-out, morally bankrupt, and blithely unaware (like Ferris Bueller, or Home Alone). As usual, the Vaught Corporation, a fictional stand-in for our world’s corporate out-of-control greed, was the ultimate villain.

I’ve been thinking about imaginative artists (like me) and AI art, and what we have to do if we want outdo simulated realism. By this, I mean the highly rendered, semi-real, semi-oil painted look AI can whip up.

I say simulated reality, because photo real is a thing artists have dabbled in for generations. That’s not what’s at issue. As artists, we want to make art that is profound, or pops off the page, or communicates great meaning or emotion. That’s not photo realism, necessarily. A good photographer can capture those things, so it’s not about medium.

I’m spitballing here, getting my head together. I don’t want to be rendered obsolete by technology. Maybe it’s inevitable, maybe not, but I don’t want to be second best to a machine. The human touch has to count for something.

So, besides being able to draw and compose well, what I see that I need to focus on is:

1) Depth of field, or aerial perspective, or loss of line in the distance

2) The color and qualities of different light and its effects on local color

3) Reflected light, core shadows and core lights, and the desaturation of shadow.

That’s a big wish list, I know. I’ve played around with all three of these in different work, but mastered none.

It’s a strange time. Photography dealt a blow to our forbearers, then 3D art in the recent past, now generative AI. There should be a path for the traditional artist to compete in.

Benita and I just got back from our one-day visit to Gen Con, and we had a great time. For a Sunday, it was unbelievably busy, and the crowds were thick. As we noted at the time, this was not an ideal place for introverts like us, but we stuck it out. The line for the will-call to get our badges took a solid hour.

I would have liked to have seen a booth for our friends at Brittannia Games Designs, but that wasn’t in the cards for them. Considering the outstanding quality of their products, primarily Chivalry and Sorcery, I’m sure they would have sold out.

Because I expressed interest in Candle Obscura and Dagger Heart, the folks at Darrington Press gave us all sorts of freebies. Publishing those game is still a ways off, but I’m looking forward to them.

At GooeyCube, I picked up a campaign setting The Wy’rded World and map pack to go with it. While the maps look too saturated for my tastes, like they had been made with Inkarnate, the campaign guidebook looks super fascinating and full of inspiration.

I picked up Kobold Presses Tales of the Valiant Alpha Release. I love KP’s products that I’ve gotten in the past, so I’m eager to dig into their new game.

I would have liked to have gone to World Anvil’s meetup nearby, but we couldn’t do that and attend Gen Con itself at the same time. Maybe in the future I’ll meet them.

Finally, I got a model 18th century sloop ship, a vessel that could easily be represented as a medieval cog when I put it together.

I had my eye out for a medieval cannon replica, and there were a few, but they were too small. I wan’t something bigger. There were some rows we didn’t get to, and there probably was a ship model to match my wants there somewhere, but patience will win out.

While I’ve heard that this might by Gen Con’s last year in Indianapolis, I hope they come back. It was a lot of fun.

My mom passed away last Thursday. It was a blessing in a way, because she had been in serious pain for years, and her body was simply shot. I talked with her every day, as as her short-term memory deteriorated sometimes two or three time per day. Now, I keep thinking she’s going to call, and I realize all over again that she will not be calling me again. Sigh. Mom was really intelligent, knew how to ask lots of probing questions from every angle, and I honestly believe she would have been great as a police interrogator.

I forgot to renew Johnnysaturn.com last week, and the site went down for a few days. I was lucky that the URL was still available, because there have been a few erstwhile Johnny Saturns over the years, most of them professional or semi-professional wrestlers. Sorry guys!

I recently purchased Topaz Photo AI, as well as their upscale, de-noiser, and sharpener. If you haven’t checked these out, they have the ability to drastically upscale pictures, and restore details that you didn’t know where there. I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

There is a lot of stuff going on, but I’ve got a thunderstorm coming so it’s time end this for now.

Scott.