"The Seeker"
An Original AI Assisted Digital Art Image
Click On Image To Visit My Zazzle Store
I’m piggy backing a little bit on the previous blog post I did, “The Controversial Issues Regarding AI” in which I the debates and fears that people who I have interacted with, have had about using AI in any capacity.
One of the arguments against AI that I came across in my wanderings had to do with one particular YouTuber who took some offense that AI isn’t really, real art, and that AI art was offensive to those people out there who were “real artists”.
She was reviewing a product. It was a tarot deck. She went on a bit of a rampage against the AI artwork. I think possibly she was more upset that the creator of the deck had not specified that it was an AI assisted art. The artist was accused of making an AI deck, and apparently… ?? … the artist claimed it was her own original art, but no one believed it. I don’t know what the real truth of that debate was.
Whatever the issue was, the fact that it was an AI generated tarot deck, or the fact it was misrepresented isn’t really my concern. But it left me feeling like I suddenly had an opinion that required my two cents.
For my part I’m concerned strictly with the idea that AI for some people, is considered “bad art” or “fake art” or somehow “unethical art” when compared to the blood sweat and tears of an “actual artist” and the hours they put into their drawings or paintings or whatever medium they use.
Let me be the first one to say, I really appreciate artists who create original pieces of art with their actual hands. I’m one of them. I did a lot of pencil sketches (animals mostly) when I was in my 20’s. I was obsessed with drawing horses and unicorns and dragons. I took Art in high school, and in Junior College. I also experimented with pastels and, pen and ink. I became a big fan of Escher and Pre Raphaelite Art.
I also became a dancer and found an artistic expression in movement. I took dance in high school and junior college as well, and then later I discovered Belly Dance, and belly dance costuming and I never looked back.
A couple of decades ago I became a self-taught beadwork artist. I do a lot of hand sewing with my bead embroidery. Some of my larger jewelry pieces can take up to 20 or 30 hours of work to finish. When someone asks me how much time it took to make a jewelry piece, I have to tell them it took approximately an entire season of X files from beginning to end.
Recently I discovered rag weaving on YouTube and other forms of multimedia art which I enjoy doing. When I was very little I decided out of the blue that I wanted to be an interior designer. It kind of stuck with me, and as a witch, making my home a magical sanctuary is something that is very important to me.
It is because of my beadwork that I opened an Etsy store several years ago. Because I had to do all of the photography for my listings, I also discovered that I was apparently an accidental photographer. This is I did not know about myself. I was quite surprised. I realized I was very good with landscape and nature photography. This is actually what transitioned me into the graphic art arena, because I had to learn to edit my photos. It wasn’t long after that I was hunting and pecking my way through building my own website.
My point is, I am an actual artist. Working with AI does not diminish me as an artist. I can’t speak for anyone else using AI, but I take just as much care and attention to detail in my graphic art designs as I do in my “real art”.
Granted it doesn’t take 30 hours to create an AI graphic design, but it has taken me the better part of five or six or seven hours on occasion. I’m not the kind of person to have AI spit out an image and be done with it. I don’t knock out 20 of them in a day. I see how someone might be doing that though. There is a process of struggle that I go through in my AI designing.
Getting what I see in my imagination to translate to the AI generator doesn’t always work very well. It’s a learning curve that I’m still trying to perfect. I’ve been known to go through 40 or 50 different image generations before picking the one image I want to work with.
After finding the design that I like, I begin to experiment with other design clip art elements to add to it. I struggled with this too because it was hard to find clip art from the Canva library that I actually liked. I finally realized I could make my own original clip art elements with the AI generator, to my specifications. I was very happy about this because I didn’t have to worry about copyright infringements on graphic design elements anymore.
My sojourn into AI was actually just as accidental as my sojourn into photography. As I mentioned I transitioned in to playing with it, while I was building my online brand. I had to do all of my own Etsy photography, graphics, web design, business cards, photography editing and so forth. So I started playing around with generating original designs one afternoon and I had a lot of fun with it.
That’s all it was for a while was just fun. Then I started getting better at it and I discovered Zazzle. My inner child and her wish to be an interior decorator got the best of me when I discovered there was a thing called “fairycore aesthetic” on Pinterest. So hours of inspiration on Pinterest, and the wish to make my own home décor items all came together. So I did the thing. I put my designs on Zazzle. Mostly because I wanted access to making my own home decor items for my own living space
If anyone else thinks my designs are as nice as I do, I’m happy to keep creating, because I would do it anyway regardless. If I can make a little passive income in the process, then great. Otherwise I do it for my own enjoyment, and for my love of fantasy art. And THAT is why I make AI generated art. Because its FUN.