Friday, 28 February 2025

FEBRUARY SUMMARY -- 2025


February 2025 was a solid month, even though I skipped the drawings sessions for the last two weeks because of a cough:


The PRINTMAKING surge came from Tucson:  


The AI programs were exploding since the release of DEEK SEEK in late January, but it seemed like the AI ART programs were more elusive, and bunching up behind paywalls -- I did get back onto Midjourney when they finally took my payment on February 14th:

Generated quickly as the Midjourney Relax-athon was still going,
with a Moodboard --profile qpdujvr




BEST DRAWINGS




I attended all figure drawing sessions  during the first half of the month (almost five nights a week) -- plus three successful figure drawing events with BEN HARRISON:

Ben Harrison organized a drawing event at the Albuquerque PRESS CLUB on February 15th:
LYCEE ANAYA of Vault Studios filmed a TV Pilot about figure drawing at the Explora Museum in Albuquerque on February 9, 2025, and Ben Harrison was one of the artists drawing the live band:


Ben Harrison also organized the figure drawing session at the Safe House Distilling Co. on February 7th, as he does every First Friday downtown ABQ Artwalk:


I continued drawing with Sharpies, trying to get a thicker line and add color to my drawings:

Drawing with colored Sharpies




I'm thinking more about
getting a portrait likeness













PRINTMAKING

Tim made me a 7 inch (at the widest) SVG file that should be ready-to-upload-and-cut:

It seemed that I was spinning fast but getting nowhere much in Albuquerque with the EXQUISITE TESSELLATION Print project, but they made great progress in Tucson:


Karsten Creightney's UNM students were printing t-shirts in his downtown studio during the First Friday downtown Artwalk on February 7th:



Tanya continues framing and hanging her Mexican prints in her Florida home:


I didn't go to PRINT AUSTIN this year, but HECHO A MANO and Pavel Acevedo did:


Photo from PRINT AUSTIN 2025
taken by Grant



AI ART
I generated the Pancake video below with a Midjourney Moodboard (--profile qpdujvr) -- and quickly, as the Relax-athon was still going on.  I got back on Midjourney again on February 14th, Valentines Day (apparently Stripe was blocking my payment):

 

After changing the colors to blue in (Hugging Space) multimodalart/cosxl, I used the WAN 2.1 video generator in KREA to generate the animation below:
It's really hard keeping up with evolving AI ART options. On one hand, things seem to be exploding, especially AI programs from China. On the other hand, it all seems rather removed and abstract, making it harder to find programs that I can actually use. If I can keep up with Hugging Space or Replicate, I can try a lot of new programs, but I quickly run out of free compute time, while other programs disappear. The solution seems to be to download and run the AI ART programs LOCALLY, which requires a supercomputer with beefy video cards. However there is one in the works at Quelab.

Meanwhile I have been using WHISK for free (launched by Google last December) to blend images, as I could not get onto Midjourney this month until February 14th (Valentines Day):


FREE AI ART Tools from Google:

When KREA comes out with new AI ART tools, they are free during the beta phase -- like the new Deep Seek "Chat" option, and the WAN 2.1 video generator.  After I upload one of my drawings I have no idea where the KREA AI will take me:
 

MESHY.AI gives me some free monthly credits for making 3D models from 2D images.  However I would love to install TRELLIS or Hunyuan3d-2-lowvram to generate 3D models for free, running locally on a Quelab computer:

Generated from a 2D image
using MESHY.AI


I used DEEP SEEK R1 in (Hugging Face) akhaliq/anychat to write a Drawing Program:

"Make a simple drawing program in the browser where all the straight lines go to infinity (the edge of a box), and all the curved lines make a circle."

The results were not pretty, but I managed to use them to make the animation below.  Hugging Space cut me off before I could perfect the program -- so I think I could do a lot better if I could run DEEP SEEK R1 on a local computer:



Now we can print and iron images onto clothes at Quelab in the Fiber Arts department -- so I did just that with an AI image I generated last year:



A man and his trusty javelina


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