JW608

Digital Artist and Illustrator

I grew up drawing. I’ve always had a half finished sketchbook laying at hand. Sometimes it got used more than others. Sometimes I’d draw every day, other times I’d go months without picking up a pencil. Occasionally I’d get serious about art and learn about anatomy(finding the Loomis head was a massive milestone in my journey) or try a new medium. Eventually I graduated to a cheap graphics tablet and entered the digital art community. I had an embarrassing Deviant Art account, I tried to follow Bob Ross, and I transferred my traditional skills over to the new digital age. As the years drew on I upgraded my setup, but my skills stagnated. I hit an artistic plateau. And I was okay with that. Until October 2024. That’s when I thought that I’ve put all this time, effort, and money into it and it’s something I love to do so I decided to put my nose to the grindstone and make a deliberate, concerted effort to improve my digital art skills. And here we are.

My Inspirations

Looking back on my life I've had many influences on my art, I'm going to try to name some of them here. Jim Davis, Gary Larson, Tex Avery, Phil and Kaja Filogo, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, Dough Wildey, Alex Toth, and probably many others I haven't remembered or realized yet.
Anime has influenced me, but not as much as those early western comic strips and cartoons I read and watched as a kid.

My View on AI and Art

Art is the expression of the human experience as seen through the eyes of the artist. This naturally excludes robots, computers, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligences. I think that AI and machine learning and automation are fascinating technologies and I encourage the advancement in those fields. But they never can nor will they ever replace or recreate human creativity, nor will they ever experience human emotions. And as such machines are incapable of making art.
I have nothing against using AI tools. I use Stable Diffusion 1.5 for resizing images. But the machine isn't creating anything, it's interpolating and replicating, sure, but not creating. I would also be okay with an artist using it for some tasks, like "make a checkerboard pattern where each square is 12x28 pixels and alternating #E4080A and #98F5F9". Can an artist do this by hand? Yes. Can we also forego the fill tool and color everything by hand? Also, yes. Menial tasks should be done by machines. "Draw the whole image for me"? Too far. Where is the line? I honestly don't know. And to be clear I used AI assistants to help me set up this website, and to write the alt text for the images!
I do believe that AI image generation will find its place in the art world (My guess is doing soulless business graphics). And I don't think artist have anything to fear in the long run. I believe that:
"Life, uh, finds a way"

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse