week 7 of 2024
illustrations generated with photoshop generative fill techniques.
Spent a good chunk of this week at an education convention spending time with fellow CTE design teachers as we built the new state standards for our programs. Good adventures with fellow counterparts that understood what I do at a fundamental level. Outstanding conversations. Took a lot of time and mental bandwidth though. Feels like I don’t have much content for the post this week. So it goes.
art effects using photoshop generative fill
At the convention I learned about an interesting technique for using Generative Fill in Photoshop to create interesting art effects from a base image. Can even use a blank document to get Photoshop to generate the base image. I’ve had a blast experimenting with different images and prompts.
I found this tutorial by Nicolesy that gives plenty of examples of what different prompts will look like.
Of course, since it is using AI to generate the effects, your mileage will vary. I’m having fun stacking multiple layers and playing with how different effects interact. Adjusting the hell out of things as well. Feels like I’m doing something more personal than letting the computer do all the work.
Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work, and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.
Playing around visually is putting me in a better mood than I’ve been in a long time. I love being an art educator and meta-thinking about my teaching practice, however I miss having time to play around with pictures. My experiments aren’t really feeling like art yet but it does feel good to be playing.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
— Chuck Close
another creative source to explore
Found another trove of interesting creative productivty inspiration from sari on Sublime. No time to explore now but adding it to the list for some unknown future when I will have time.
feeling old
And then there is this. I’m feeling old and slow this weekend after all the adventures. Nice to have time to be slow and quiet.
