I'm starting off 2024 like last year, trying to keep up with -- Life Drawing, Printmaking and AI ART:
LIFE DRAWING
This is a drawing blog, so below is a YouTube video of my January 2024 life drawings to remind me of that:
PRINTS
We signed up to make a big print when BIG INK comes to FUSION in Albuquerque on April 13th and 14th. Virgil Velasco, Henry Morales and Ellie Weadock have already started carving the MDF blocks, and will piece them together to make a big collaborative print about White Sands, New Mexico:
Meanwhile Virgil Velasco made some great prints at Henry Morales' studio this month:
I bought a Harbor Freight Rolling Toolbox to carry around our new BIG SHOT PLUS press, so that we can do pop-up print workshops anywhere:
The idea was to carry all the printmaking supplies in one box on the Rail Runner train up to Santa Fe. This is a little heavy, so the wheels might actually be a windfall.
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Ellie ordered us some
The prints are now stored in 8x8 inch scrapbooks from Amazon:
AI ART
I got back on Midjourney, after having problems paying them with a prepaid American Express gift card, and made more videos (also using PIKA LABS on Discord) with an Easy Rider NM theme:
Midjourney and PIKA LABS
Leonardo.AI gave their free users access to their powerful "Alchemy" option for a week (January 22- 28, 2024). I thus used Alchemy to enhance my life drawings with a model made from my long drawings:
And then....
AI ART PROGRAMS
New AI PROGRAMS:
3D Scanning apps:
- Magiscan
- Scaniverse free (with Lidar, Apple only)
- 3D Scanner App (with Lidar, Apple only)
- Yasusi Kanada -- AI Art Blog (and Open Art)
- Online Pattern maker -- Patternico
- AI Photo Editor
- YouTube: AI Actors are Here! What Comes Next?
- I2VGen-XL (Hugging Face)
- ali-vilab/i2vgen-xl (Replicate)
- DragNUWA 1.5 (Hugging Face) (YouTube)
- Dollars MOTS
- OptimizeGLB
- vast-ai/TriplaneGaussian (YouTube)
BLENDER
- YouTube: How To Easily RIG Characters With RIGIFY in BLENDER 3
- YouTube: Rigify Made Easy: Beginner's Guide to Effortless Character Rigging
- YouTube: How to Rig and Animate in BLENDER! (troubleshooting)
- YouTube: [blender]Rigify spine.004 error cannot conect chain처리방법
- Blastframe -- Blender "Ultimate Animators Bundle" (YouTube: Ultimate Animators Bundle [Blender Add-ons])
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Midjourney introduced their "Alpha" interface, which I managed to use on the last day of the month, January 31st. This stand-alone website allows me to scroll through every AI image I generated, as well as those generations by others. I can easily blend images (mine and anyone else's) in the Alpha interface and generate new images. While this seems more powerful, I wonder if it also makes all the images look more and more similar.
Also note that PIKA started charging for their new image generator -- the one on the stand-alone website (not the PIKA LABS on Discord). On January 12th they adjusted giving free users a few daily credits.
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**Odd Note: The only other time I made as many posts (18) in January was in 2018, when I was still drawing in many different groups in many different cities: Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Corrales, Tijeras, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio...
