This post is a disclaimer of sorts: my original art that I sometimes post here and other places uses a pretty cursed, feral hybrid workflow. Yes, that involves generative AI, but, I don't think that makes the work fake.

I like pretty things. My star sign even says so: I'm a Libra. From 2005 to 2010, I scraped all sorts of internet places just to look at endless streams of images: deep canyons, cute catgirls, technical spec sheets, alien-looking tech, whatever visual treasure or garbage I could get.

I looked at dozens of millions of images. Literally. Not "a lot" in the rhetorical sense. Dozens of millions.

Okay, I was terminally online at the time (shit, I still am!), but I enjoyed it, okay? We're all weird. We'd better be, otherwise the world would be a pretty damn dull place.

After wading through that much visual garbage and treasure, I learned two things: not to put 100k files in one directory, and what I find pretty.

And, frankly, I hate AI slop; who doesn't? I hate what it has done to image search, to the internet, and to the basic experience of looking for something beautiful. Google is downright unusable now. Hell, DuckDuckGo, of all things, beats the world's richest company at its own game! That says a lot.

But AI keeps getting better, and I have images in my head that are my own that I want other people to see: the so-called "original content", the gold nuggets of the old internet. And I'm in drawing school, but honestly, drawing often feels like a chore. I'm an engineer first. So I use whatever gets them out of my head. A sketch. A photograph. A generated image. Custom software. (Lots of it.) Some cursed combination of all four. Then I edit. And redo. And redo again. I fix composition, perspective, anatomy, and lighting. I clean up glitches and remove whatever fresh nightmare the previous step created. I come up with a new idea late into the process, and that sometimes means restarting from step zero.

One piece usually takes ten to fifteen hours. I make these because I love it; the process, the images coming to live. And I do think they look nice. That's really all there is to it.

Sometimes someone likes a picture, discovers that AI touched it somewhere along the way, and starts CSI: Pixel Art. They zoom into individual pixels and go, "AHA".

Darling, the pixels were there five minutes ago. Your eyecandy doesn't have to pass purity tests. IMHO. 🩷

Anyway, the Snowflake Public License applies. Peace, y'all! :D