Friday 30 August 2024

AUGUST SUMMARY -- 2024

Besides continuing with FIGURE DRAWING, PRINTMAKING, and AI ART in August -- I had my photo taken in Belen, New Mexico by Axle Contemporary mobile art van for their "E Pluribus Unum: Mogollon" project:





I visited the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell this month. Larry Bob Phillips runs the RAIR Art Residency program there.



BEST DRAWINGS

My best figure drawings of August 2024:





Collaboration with Ken Romig















PRINTMAKING

We participated in the 3rd big PRINTERS PLANET Festival in Santa Fe on August 11th 2024.  It's a chore and a pleasure keeping up with all the printmaking/trouble-making activity, focused around the EXQUISITE TESSELLATION Project:


BODY LANGUAGE exhibition reception at the New Mexico Art League:

Our collaborative print was hanging in the BODY LANGUAGE exhibition at the New Mexico Art League, and the reception was on August 3, 2024:



PRINTERS PLANET Festival in Santa Fe:

We demo-ed printmaking and gave prints out for free during the PRINTERS PLANET Festival in Santa Fe on August 11, 2024: 


We collaborated with OffCenter Arts:
Ellie helped me pull an edition of 40 prints for the SOUTHWEST PRINT FIESTA Print Exchange 2024, due in Silver City by September 6th:
The individual "hat" prints looked good when printed on an apron (and then we got carried away with Henry's apron):

There was printmaking on the streets again during the downtown Albuquerque FIRST FRIDAY ARTWALK on August 2, 2024:
We are printing again in Santa Fe on September 14th during the "Carve It" event at Hecho A Mano gallery, 6 - 8 PM.  Julie Sola of Las Vegas, New Mexico will be directing the event, and I will be bringing up all the materials.  I made a blog post about what to expect:




AI ART

New AI ART programs keep coming out, but somehow they feel less liberating.  This is not just because the new programs have more limited free options, but because nothing new seems to leap over the AI Art programs that we already have.

A new AI Art generator -- FLUX -- did make some waves.  And X came out with an uncensored AI image Generator "Grok 2" (but you have to be a paying member of X to use it).

IDEOGRAM (YouTube) upgraded, and Midjourney is allowing new users a free trial, of 25 image generations total.

It still seems that AI Video is the main focus.  LTX STUDIO (YouTube) became available, though I haven't tried it.


The older AI programs are working best for me. I used Petalica Paint and Haiper to animate the space and the figure below.  The result feels kin to the paintings of Roberto Matta (who worked for Le Corbusier):

This AI Animation activates the space

  • FLUX.1 [dev] on Hugging Face generated free AI images.  FLUX is a new AI image program which debuted on August 6, 2024





  • SCANIVERSE -- Adric scanned Robert's inside-out stuffed dino on his phone in 3D using Scaniverse. Then we made the dino into a 3D AR object which could be placed in the real world with a smartphone.  After that we took a screen shot and animated it with Haiper, and AI Animation program:

  • HOTSHOT came out on August 20th, allowing people to make AI videos for free (YouTube):




Video seems to be the main focus of the AI programs. These are all the current AI Video generators I know of:

I experimented with Deep Dream "AI Upscaler" by uploading a lot of my old colored pencil drawings to it -- opting for the "Art/Realism" option with the Creativity slider to 100%.  I wasn't really pleased with the results, although they were "more realistic."



The reverse image search with Google Lens changed.  Rather than just search on the image, on August 21st Google took a shot of my whole screen, and then cropped and searched on the image.

By August 28th Google abandoned the screen shot and just allowed one to choose "Search with Google Lens" and crop anywhere on your screen to do a reverse search.  Are they storing a screen shot of your whole page, including bookmarks and other peripherals?

This popped up unannounced in my Chrome browser
on August 28th, the new GOOGLE LENS


AI Inbreeding

They have already started training the new AI programs on AI generated images -- for instance, Open AI's newer model "Strawberry."  This approach ducks the copyright issues -- but will it also generate inferior images?  This is sort of the Habsburg approach, no?



PROGRAMS

3D
AI VIDEO


*****

2024 SUMMARIES

August 30, 2024 -- Portrait

The portrait session on Friday nights is free -- FRIDAY NIGHT FACES -- but the artists had to give their drawings to the sitter. This session was at Art Buddies in Albuquerque:






Adres Fidel r.a. is doing well in Mexico City (Instagram):



August 29, 2024

We drew at the Edith Bunker in Albuquerque, with Monty Singer and Brian Gonzales:





















Wednesday 28 August 2024

August 28, 2024

We drew at Fusion in Albuquerque; Chuck Lockhart runs the session: