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Showerthought: I used to hate AI art until a digital painter friend showed me her workflow
For like two years I was dead set against any AI art tools. I thought they just stole from real artists and ruined the whole point of making something yourself. But last month my friend Sarah who does commission work for DnD characters showed me how she uses an AI generator to block out color palettes and rough compositions in like 5 minutes. She still paints everything by hand in Procreate but the AI helps her iterate faster on ideas. What got me was watching her reject 90% of what the AI spat out because it had no soul or proper anatomy. She said it's basically a fancy reference board not a replacement. Now I get that banning all AI stuff is like blaming Photoshop for bad drawings back in the 90s. Has anyone else here actually sat down with an artist who uses these tools and watched their full process?
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bailey.jennifer7d ago
My buddy Dan does concept art for indie game studios. He showed me how he uses Midjourney to generate like 30 different mood boards for a fantasy castle scene, but then he spends two weeks hand-painting the final version based on one tiny detail from one of those images. The AI just gave him a starting point for lighting and color, not the actual work. He said the whole process is faster but somehow harder because he has to ignore so much bad AI nonsense to find the one thing worth keeping.
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josephbailey7d ago
Yeah but see here's the thing that gets me - how do we know when the AI is actually helping versus just giving people an excuse to skip learning the fundamentals? Like your friend Sarah sounds legit because she can already paint and knows anatomy and all that. But what about someone who just starts with AI and never learns to draw a straight line? I met this kid at a coffee shop who was bragging about his "art career" and all he did was type prompts and trace over the results. That's not the same thing at all. So where's the line between using AI as a tool and using it as a crutch?
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