September 2020 was a thaw from the Covid summer slumber. On August 29th, Governor Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham lifted some of the restrictions so that I could go back to slacking at coffee houses in Albuquerque and using their Wi-Fi.
Art began to surface again publically as I pulled an edition at Remarque Print Workshop for the Southwest Print Fiesta Print Exchange 2020, and documented the steamroller printing event on September 4th.
Even though the Southwest Print Fiesta is cancelled this year in Silver City, they still sponsored the Southwest Print Fiesta Print Exchange due on October 1st. I pulled an edition of 40 relief prints at Remarque Print Workshop in Albuquerque for the print exchange.
The final print was "slightly fake" as I used AI (artificial intelligence) to blend one of my drawings with the style of one of Pavel Acevedo's prints in Deep Dream Generator. There was a lot of post-AI editing in Photoshop Elements to arrive at an image suitable to pull as a relief print.
All spring and summer I pushed my drawings as far as I could using free software (April - May - June/ July - August). This relief print is somewhat the result of all that effort, finally emerging in a real world medium.
Moreover I based it on one of the best drawings of 2019, had it engraved on the laser cutter at QueLab hackerspace, and printed it at Remarque Print Workshop. Therefore this print is the greater culmination of everything I have been working with, not just AI, from a lot of different sources.
STEAMROLLER PRINTING
September 4th
I assisted and documented the steamroller printing event on September 4th at Isleta Amphitheater in Albuquerque.
ARTIFICIAL IGNORANCE
I continued the AI (artificial intelligence) explorations I started in August in Runway ML, by purposely warping a StyleGAN2 model. I arrested the training process at an early point, so that the resulting "model" was a blend of half Krrrl drawings and half bird images. The idea was to generate something in my drawing style that was not entirely based on my hand. By working a little ignorance into the process I was hoping to surprise myself with the result.
Then I colored and edited one of the generated drawings before animating it with "Layered Depth Inpainting" just for fun.
Another example of the "Layered Depth Inpainting" software in Google's Colab environment:
The animated effect
gives a little more volume to my figure drawing
- List of other Google Colab art programs
DRAWING BOTS
I searched "drawing bots" in Google to see if there were any programs that would assist or automatically make drawings. I found one great resource -- Drawingbots/Tools -- a collection of programs, like Plotter Fun, that would alter my drawings.
Turtle Toy generates great patterns that apply to my drawings:
Then I got carried away:
FAKE DRAWING
TO FAKE PRINTS
I blended the Turtle Toy pattern to one of my FAKE Krrrl drawings in my first attempt to make a FAKE print.
I transferred the style of the below pattern to one of my fake drawings in Deep Dream Generator.
Distorted Turtle Toy pattern
We did cut it out on the laser cutter at QueLab, I just forgot to "invert" the image (though I did flip it horizontally). Thus negative space would have printed black, and the delicate figure lines would have shown through as white on white paper. That would look horrible.
I might have used white ink to print on black paper, but that is a complication. Black paper is harder to come by, and the white ink takes forever to dry. The prints would probably have not been ready to ship before the October 1st deadline. However white-on-black prints could have looked good like my edition for the first Horned Toad Print Exchange.
PUSH-BUTTON ART
I continue to push my drawings through Deep Dream Generator, still looking for the perfect styles to transfer to my drawings. I discovered that the best style references are my most successful AI altered drawings. This makes sense as "Like on Like" always seems to give more pleasing results.
When I transfer the styles from my best drawings, to my black and white drawings, I get almost instant satisfaction. Then I usually do not need a lot of post-AI editing in Photoshop to make a pleasing image.
This "Like on Like" approach seems to work whether I am transferring various styles to the same drawing (as above), or the same style to various drawings (as below).
The "Text-to-Art" programs create push-button art even more quickly:
GO BIG
I printed out one of my best drawings of 2019 on the large format printer at "the copy shop formerly known as Kinkos." This was an SVG file made in Vectorizer, from a web-sized image -- and it came out pretty well.
- Standing Lady (6.66 MB -- the pictured version)
- Voronoi_again__002 (437.72 KB -- the Voronoi version from July)
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Whenever I go to Mexico City I like to drop in on the Wednesday night art lecture at SOMA. Because of the Covid lockdown, SOMA has been posting their lectures online. I watched the live episode on September 23, 2020, from the comfort of QueLab in Albuquerque.
