Great little tutorial on colored pencils
I remember when you had to pay for and go to art classes. It’s amazing what you can find online and learn for free.
AI architecture
Architects and designers are increasingly experimenting with AI generated art and designs. Michael Arellanes II of MA2 Studio created a series called ‘Synthetic Futures’ in which he experiments primarily with Midjourney in an attempt to create a consistent and controlled aesthetic for architecture.
I personally think wide-scale use of AI based art generation to continue a theme or even explore and create new ideas/directions is a foregone conclusion at this point. I’m continually astounded by the results these algorithms generate. Results that will just get better very quickly.
Arellanes seems to agree when he says: ‘The current open platforms for AI imagery work from word descriptions alone, as opposed to architectural 3D modeling and/or encoding surface parameters. This leaves the operator with flat images or AI impressions based on descriptions with extraordinary results of the unexpected. The unexpected results are the most exciting aspect of this new paradigm. As designers test the limits of AI’s imagination and complex image compositions, new possibilities emerge that have never been seen before.’
Enhancing your stable diffusion game
AI generated art has caught fire. Learning how to generate the command line prompts to generate the art is still a work of trial and error. But some folks are helping you learn by giving some example prompts to help you learn what works and what doesn’t.
All the below items were 100% auto-generated and included on the page. It looks like people are exploring and sharing different prompts to generate different kinds of art.
- Portrait Photography
- Graphic Design
- Architecture
- Clothing design
- 3D and game concept art
- Graphic design
Links:
Rise of the AI Prompt Engineer
Using online AI art generation sites like DALLE, Midjourney, and GPT-3 aren’t free or unlimited to most folks. For example, DALL-E 2 was charging 10 cents per prompted generation attempt. Trying a few hundred prompts can quickly add up. Even using free generators like Stable Diffusion, experimenting with prompts can be time consuming.
It only makes sense we’re witnessing the rise of specialist prompt writers and online marketplaces where you can buy and sell high-quality prompts that get the desired results much faster. This saves users money on API fees and time trying to tune the prompt to get what you want.
These even have names now. A prompt engineer is a specialist adept at writing the text prompts necessary for an AI model to generate reliable outputs (such as graphics, text, or code) at a reasonable price. They can then sell the specialized prompts they generate on a prompt marketplace. These are sites where users can purchase and sell prompts. The prompt maker usually keeps 80% of the sale, and the marketplace takes a 20% cut.
Below are some of the top paid Prompt Marketplaces. Definitely worth browsing to see the amazing work that can be generated by AI art algorithms.
PromptBase – offers an amazing amount of prompts for just a few dollars:
PromptHero – seems to be geared towards higher-end generation
Links:
Spray-on dress
Coperni at the Paris fashion showed off a spray-on dress that uses synthetic fibers suspended in a quick drying/evaporating polymer solution.
While some people are calling it “fashion history” others point out there’s really not a lot of new tech or ideas here. Fiber infused spray-on coats like this have existed for decades and painted body costumes have been around a long time. This is very much like how paper has been made by interlacing and drying wood fibers into a solid sheet. It is an interesting development to see at something as high-class as Paris Fashion week. Supposedly the dress could be re-used, but I wonder how easily one could get in/out of it without tearing it. I would guess they might even be able to repair tears with just a spray touch-up to fill the gaps with new fiber.
Or you could go the exact other direction: Dissolvable dresses.
And then there are clothes that become transparent based on your increasing heart rate.
Links:
Photocrom Print Collection and online inspiratino
I think we forget the amazing collections of historical artifacts we have on the internet. The limitations of Covid has left me doing a lot of traveling and bucket list visits to famous places via Youtube and online streamers.
I started looking up filming locations for a favorite movie of mine – The Grand Budapest Hotel. Pre-soviet eastern block countries had amazing architecture. In my searching, it turns out Wes Anderson tried to capture the feel for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel from old Photochrom prints.
The Photochrom Print Collection is available for free from the Library of Congress and has thousands of early prints of European and North American images from the 1890’s to 1910’s.
It makes me wonder what amazing artistic creations people can make using just the free resources we have at our fingertips today – plus some imagination.
Paper Art
Paper sculptures and art have become quite amazing as of late. Laser cutters have made some pretty interesting creations possible. Now there’s a new book by Gingko Press called Paperists: Infinite Possibilities in Paper Art that covers a lot of the different methods artists are using.
Google Maps as a traveling music video
The song isn’t particularly catchy, but filmmaker Adam Chitayat collected thousands of Google Maps Street View images which he used to build a music video for the track Out Sailing.
nVidia GET3D auto-generates objects for your 3D Worlds
GET3D (Generate Explicit Textured 3D) generates a wide variety of objects to fill your 3D worlds. It’s soon to be released open source if you want to try out.
Yo Ho Ho and The Fall
The 2006 movie The Fall is an under-rated movie that I really enjoyed for it’s unique story and beautiful, dream-like visuals. Set in 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman (Roy) begins to tell a fantastic story of five mythical heroes to a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality blurs as the tale advances. Roy’s true motives and desperation start coming out as his story progresses.
The making of the movie by Tarsem Singh was a real labor of love. The film was shot in 28 countries over four years. No stages or sets were used, only existing absolutely fabulous and exotic locations were used. Filming locations included the Namibian desert, Cape Town Africa, Hagia Sophia, Palace in Jaipur, Rajasthan India, Fiji, Rome, Bali, Egypt, China, Boliva, and countless others bucket list locations.
With as few people that know The Fall, even fewer know it was based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho (Bulgarian: Йо-хо-хо). In Yo Ho Ho, an actor crippled after a bad fall on stage befriends a 10 year old boy who is recovering from a broken arm in hospital. The actor starts telling a marvelous fairy tale, inventing stories about a good buccaneer fighting the evil ruler Alvarez that must be punished for his crimes. Little by little the real people in hospital are transformed into the imaginary heroes of the pirate stories that the Actor and the child vanquish by goodness, honesty and self-denial – all the while the actor intends to use the child to provide him with poison to end his life.
Yo Ho Ho (Йо-хо-хо) is terribly hard to find. There is a youtube video, but no subtitles. Even ebay seems to have failed me, but it appears DVDLady has a copy available.