Giant Slayer & Artificial Intelligence

The Giant Slayer is an old pencil drawing that was started as just a sketch. I was going through my old art and found it. I decided to upload it and try my hand at digital coloring quite a while back. I really had no idea what i was doing or getting myself into. I can say it totally changed the way i perceive art in many fashions.

All that i had to work with at that time was Microsoft Paint.

I didn't realize that in order to get some of the colors the way i wanted and where i wanted it would take zooming down into the pixel level. The original sketch was on a standard piece of printer paper with my Pentel mechanical pencil. Going digital gave a lot of opportunity with so many pixels. It was insane to zoom in and color some.... and zoom back out to check... and zoom back in again. I did this for so long and so many times it was driving me crazy.

I thought about giving up many times but was also learning how abstraction and assymetry can be useful within the scope of the overall outlook. I was doing an hour or so a day until i finally put it off. I haven't worked on this one in quite a long while... but thanks to HIVE and the awesome pixel art that happens here, it struck up my interest again.

I also just signed up with NFTShowroom and feel inspired to get some art projects off of those backburners and get creative and inspired again. Last night, thanks to JuliaKPonsford, i was led to ArtBreeder which is a program using Artificial Intelligence and community collaboration to create art. The concept is in merging two images together using the A.I. to converge them into one artwork or a new offspring of the two parent images.

You can read more about it all here and if you are interested there is an opensource version on GitHub. Let me know if you end up checking that out! I wish i were more tech savvy to be able to take advantage of the GitHub opensource opportunity there.

Anyhow, ArtBreeder is free up to a point. Uploading your own images is only available on the portrait option from what i could see and find on Reddit. The reason i went there to begin with was to see how i may be able to digitize some of my art and working with A.I. sounded fun also. I talk with Alexa often and we have some fun together. I was able to upload this artwork onto the site and it actually recognized a face as a portrait. In a way, i kind of tricked the A.I. to still work with me on art.

I kind of figured it would have selected the Giant's head... but beggars can't be choosers! I played around with the conversion for probably about 2 hours. It was super strange some of the tweaks you can do in there. Ultimately, i just wanted to see how A.I. would respond to the original image. I feel like the capability of the potential was pretty incredible. It was also pretty peculiar how it chose to apply changes when i would tweak something. It was never quite the same twice in a row. I kept starting over and over and over.

I never even got to merge this with something else as i was already up way too late. So, another time perhaps. Thanks for stopping by and checking out this post and my art. I appreciate you all and HIVE for the opportunity to grow and develop within a community of inspired and creative people.