I used the new Nano Banana 2 program to display the best fake AI ART that I generated in February, in a fake museum that was also generated with AI -- in contrast to Henry Morales' REAL print exhibitions at the Juan Tabo and Tijeras Public Libraries in Albuquerque. All the fake AI drawings and sculptures are based on my figure drawings:
FAKE EXHIBITION
of my fake AI ART
CLICK on the sculptures and drawings --
to find out more about them
- Nano Banana 2 prompt: "A gallery with these framed drawings and sculptures" (I uploaded 6 images)
- (YouTube): Nanobanana 2 is here!
- Nano Banana 2 came out on February 26, 2026
I asked Nano Banana 2 for a view from the opposite side
The FAKE museum show above featured AI interpretations of my drawings this month, from the following blog posts:
.gif)
Animation of all the February 2026 images
in the FAKE museum
that I uploaded to Nano Banana 2
I first used the old Nano Banana, and it did NOT generate a good gallery:
This Nano Banana 2 gallery is reminiscent of the Virtual Gallery exhibits I made previously:
- Crytovoxels (2021) defunct
- Spatial (2022) YouTube
***
Later I transformed the standing sculpture in the gallery into a 3D object -- to be viewed in AUGMENTED REALITY:
UPDATE: I put the AR version on the stage during the drawing group on March 4, 2026, as it was the same model that night that the AI paper sculpture was based on:
The AR figure placed on the model stage at Fusion
I turned my figure drawing into a paper sculpture using KREA (Realtime) -- and then converted the 2D paper sculpture into 3D using KREA (Huyuan3D 3.1 Pro). I then downloaded the resulting OBJ file and converted it into a GLB object in Blender. I uploaded that GLB into Paint 3D and again downloaded the GLB file. I had to go through all these programs to get a GLB file that would work with Model Viewer to make the AR code.
I further compressed the GLB paper sculpture in GLB Compressor, getting the file down to 1.62 MB. However the Model Viewer program swelled that GLB file up to 16.85 MB.
The 8th Wall AR software went Open Source on February 28, 2026, as the company ceased to exist.
DRAWINGS
BEN HARRISON put on another drawing session at the SECRET GALLERY in downtown Albuquerque on the last day of February 2026 (like he did twice before, on January 10, 2026 and December 20, 2025):
Mark Archuleta filmed the session and included it in the video he made about BEN HARRISON:
This is the drawing that I converted to a sculpture
and placed in the gallery at the top this blog post,
as well as put into Augmented Reality
Kirsten collaborated with Barbara, Rupert and I -- drawing "duets" -- on February 2, 2026. When collaborating, both artists drew on the same paper at the same time:
I went through my past blog posts to find examples of all the different approaches I have used to draw the figure:
PRINTS
As 2026 is the "Year of the Fire Horse" -- which only comes around ever 60 years in the Chinese Zodiac -- we made collaborative EXQUISITE TESSELLATION horse prints. We hung those in the East Mountain Public Library in Tijeras, New Mexico on February 28, 2026:
The prints were designed around Henry Morales' big horse tessellation print that he carved for the Steamroller Tessellation Prints last year, at the Southwest Print Fiesta 2025. This is very poetically appropriate since the same artists have been drawing and collaborating in Henry Morales' studio for a few years now:
Printmaker CHRISTIN APODACA came up from El Paso to paint a mural at the SECRET GALLERY in Albuquerque for their La Malinche exhibition, opening on February 6, 2026:
Albuquerque and El Paso had a print exchange last year -- FORGOTTEN REACH -- which was hanging in the art building at UNM in February. This was a student print exchange -- between printmakers at UNM and UTEP (University of New Mexico and the University of Texas at El Paso) -- directed by professors Aaron Bass (UNM) and Manuel Guerra (UTEP). All the prints were black-and-white serigraphs:
Adric brought a leather press to Quelab, so that we could finally use the die to punch out tessellation shapes from linoleum and stiff foam, and make collaborative EXQUISITE TESSELLATION prints:
Julianna Kirwin told me about this new Print-and-Coffee shop -- PRINT BOUND PRESS -- behind the Albuquerque Museum in Old Town:
Metal registration piece
AI ART
The Google AI ART program -- Nano Banana 2 -- came out on February 26, 2026, and is very powerful:
Repeat of the AI gallery at the beginning of this blog post
(only in better resolution and without the image map)
generated in Nano Banana 2
I really liked how "KREA Realtime" translated my drawings into paper sculptures:
.jpg)
I asked Deep Dream Generator to put a bikini
on the sculpture that I generated from my drawing
.png)
I animated some of the images I generated with Midjourney in 2023 this month -- in Midjourney, of course. Midjourney only added video genearation last year, on June 18th, 2025, so that I could not animate them originally:
AI PONDERING
One of the big questions looming over my AI ART is whether any of my art DNA survives in the final generation. It seems that I get similar results, even when I start out with poor images:
I wonder if I would get the same results with AI if I had uploaded an image of a HAM SANDWICH. How much influence, and control, do my drawings have on the AI generated result?
Meanwhile The Dor Brothers generated an AI movie in 24 hours, and it looks pretty good! I suspect that the issue will be not the quality, but rather that all AI generated movies will look the same. I already think that AI ART programs are shoehorning their generations into a narrow variety of styles. That's one of my big criticisms of Midjourney.
***
- We set up Stable Diffusion on a server at Quelab with 28 Gigs of VRAM on February 1, 2026.
- Doug told me that one can install and train LoRAs for Stable Diffusion Automatic 1111 in this program: bmaltais/kohya_ss
- I reviewed all the AI models I trained on my drawings
Also this month there was a lot of innovations and fanfare in AI Agents (though I never used any of them):
- (YouTube): Clawdbot is about to BREAK EVEREYTHING
- (YouTube): PicoClaw
- (YouTube): OpenAI Just “Absorbed” OpenClaw and the AI World Exploded
- (YouTube): "We need to build more data centers, AI needs it."
MORE
PREVIOUS
