Art as a means of survival. Call it therapy.

 

Well ... if you've read my previous post, you'll know what my biiiig problem is at the moment. How many times are you told to prepare for imminent widowhood, and how are you supposed to deal with it?! Beats heck out of me. I don't have any more answers to this question now than I had in October last year, when the bombshell dropped on us from a great height. But life goes on, and even though I -- honestly, seriously, genuinely, unavoidably, do not have time to do artwork, the images and imagination are still bubbling away inside my brain. Now...

You know me. Normally, I don't actually approve of AI. I've always said that AI art is not real art -- and it isn't. That belief hasn't changed, and won't change. Art is where an artist sits down with tools and hours to spend on a unique project, and when they're done, they sign off on something that is a slice of their personality, a taste on their soul, a mirror reflecting their psyche. That's real art. AI is ... well, it's like this:

But although that, above, is neither artwork nor photography, it is vision, it is imagination, it is  creativity. And there are times -- as I am discovering right now -- when AI has its part to play. My mind is still filled with visions. My imagination is still running hot and fast. Mentally, I have never been more creative, but there is no time or energy, and there are no resources for me to "do art." But...

...if I don't find an outlet for all this imagination and creativity, I am probably going to go bonkers. Sure, a lot of you will line up to say I've been bonkers for years, and you're probably right. But this is quite a nice kind of bonkers; the kind that prompts beauty and serenity, and invites one's mind to spin stories off the top of images that popped out of the scenes I've glimpsed. Like:

That. There's a game I used to play years ago, when Mom was in her last months and I was, frankly, climbing the walls with grief and anxiety, not even admitting that I, myself, was seriously ill (and due to land in hospital for multiple surgeries only ten weeks after Mom passed, in 2017). I would slap together five or ten completely unrelated images and challenge myself, and other people who played the game with me, to conjure a story that wove together all the images. Mmmm...

It was fun, and it would give me just a few minutes' relief and release from the burden of reality. Now, I'm not going to tell you that Dave and I have reached that point yet. We're still fighting this thing. But we're also told that there is no way back from this beast that has sunk its claws into him, and all we can do is buy time, days, weeks, months that are to be cherished before it gets ... ugly. Well, we'll see about that. But the spectre is there in the back of your mind most of the time. Hmmm.

All of the above comes down to an inescapable bottom line. I need to find a way to "get out of myself" for long enough to hold onto my sanity. It cannot be art per se: as I said before, there is neither time nor energy for proper art. And as for writing -- same story. I'm an editor now. A good one. I enjoy it, and I do it well. But as for writing? No energy. You might not realise how much energy it takes to write coherent, luminous, emotionally rewarding fiction. Those days, if they ever return, and I hope they do, probably belong to a relatively distant future. But --

I can negotiate with an AI to winkle some of this creativity out of my beleaguered brain. And this is the part that AI has to play. Call it therapy, if you like. It relaxes me. It "takes me out of myself," and for just a short time I can forget, or almost forget, the beast that is lurking in the shadows. So...

...so let's visit alien worlds. Let's travel to other times and places. Let's forget who we are and what we must do just to get through one more day. Let's embrace AI for what it is: therapy. And no, I am not claiming that I painted any of these images! I didn't. You know me better. I hope, than to think I'd tell porkies of that magnitude! The most I did was put the images into Photoshop, adjust the colour balance, gamma, saturation, erase some "artefacts," and add lens flare.

I enjoy working on Photoshop -- always did -- and it's quick, once you know how to drive it properly. But 99.5% of this visual material, today, is right out of the AI, given some pretty smart prompts from yours truly, to get close (or close enough) to the images I'd imagined, to accept the result and smile. Like this:

Now, that's just neat, and it took about three minutes. The AI I'm using is mostly Imagen_4, which is accessed via Google's Gemini, plus, occasionally, Image-fx, also from Google. The images are better than those from Bing, and also Google doesn't "play silly buggers" with points that are traded for the privilege of making a picture -- points you have to buy or earn by patronising Microsoft in some way. Got no time, no money, and zero desire to faff about, guys. Google just gifts me the freedom to make pictures when I have some free time, and when inspiration is burning...

So let's hang onto sanity while Dave and I get through this, however we get through it. And in the meantime, let's go places and do things through the medium of images that I can create, via the alchemy of AI. I've embraced it. It has its place: it is serving me. It is going a long way toward saving me. I've changed my signature line to read "Jen's AI Imagination," which is utterly candid and honest. So let's see where Imagen_4 and Image-fx take us. (To reach Imagen_4 you just go to gemini.google.com and type in, "Create an image..." and then describe what you want. To use Image-fx, you would go to https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx, and follow the prompts. Gemini's Imagen_4 is so easily that a five year old could use it. The other is more ambitious. I leave it to you to choose your favourite.)

The April Report

 It's been so long since I touched down here. If a blog is supposed to be a journal of one's thoughts and deeds, I'm neglecting this badly!. So much has happened ... so much didn't. I could have blogged here and whined the whole time, so it's probably a good thing I gave it a miss, till I can touch base with myself and catch up without, uh, whinging. Too much.

The last couple of months haven't been easy. All we'd planned for the wedding anniversary got cancelled literally at the last minute. It was supposed to be a road trip to the Limestone Coast, and ended up as $4,100's worth of car repairs, and a handful of outings, the most significant of which was a train ride up to the Botanic Gardens, while the car was in dock ...

The train ride was an experience; not something I've ever done, in fifty years of living in this city, this state, this country. Not something I'd want to do all the time, though. The Botanic Gardens were very lovely; I walked so far that day, these poor old feet took almost a week to recover! We drove to Seaford, which is the end of the line, and rode the train right through to the other end of the line -- takes not much under an hour.

In fact, these poor feet were still a big issue when the anniversary itself rolled around. Then ... 7:00am, 20th March, I ploughed up a hardwood floor withy my left kneecap. Uh huh. It's now April 28, over five weeks layer, and it still hurts, though I can walk properly. Dave and I did a drive around part of the Barossa Valley, and had lunch at the Lorch Lyndoch to mark the date. (The food is excellent, though expensive; we've been there before, and enjoyed it both times.)

So, being lame and in a lot of pain, I concentrated on getting Dark is the Valley finished, and getting to grips with artwork -- so much to learn there. Well, Dark... was done on time, and submitted; in fact, it's already racking up the rejections. This is a bugger of a career, one based on countless thousands of hours worked for nothing, then the heartache and disappointment of untold rejections while you wait, hope, and even pray if you know how, to see a contract and a few bucks. We're still hoping, and my next major project is Pet Shop Dragons. I just finished a longer, better version of Exit Strategies, which is out on sub now. You can only try. So -- art...

Yeeees, I kept myself busy with art, and have done a lot of good work. Also spent a lot more than I'd intended to, on new props, costumes, shaders, sets, whatever. But it's my hobby, so -- what the heck. The latest challenge I've handed myself is to get back into Terragen, learn it, use it to generate the atmospherics for DAZ backdrops. The oars are in the water, but it's a steep learning curve --

Like getting back up on my feet again, and getting back to walking. I've done this, but it wasn't easy. I'm back to the point where I can walk four kilometres, and a bunch of it uphill, which is the equivalent of walking more like seven or eight. Being able to walk means I can get out with the cameras again, which is something I love, and have always loved; the last year has been about birding, since I got my hands on the Panasonic Lumix in February 2020 --

...the bad news is that something has happened to the Lumix. It just ain't working properly. The light metering is off by a mile, and it's giving me ludicrous shutter speeds, apertures and ISO numbers, which are making my pictures soft, grainy, noisy. I can't take a landscape to save my life because all detail blurs out into great swatches of colour; if anything moves in the shot, it blurs; and when the light levels fall, the ISO is so high, you're seeing the photo through golf ball sized grain. Grrrr. 

The bottom line is, I need a new camera. It's going to cost $550, and at the same time, my cash flow has quit. Brilliant. So I've pulled the old Fuji HS-10 out of retirement to pick up the slack. It also has 720mm of zoom, though it only has half the megapixels ... it's also slow, and has all its own problems, but at least I get photos.

So at this moment I'm muddling along. Getting photos, doing art, working on this and that writing project -- getting back up on my feet after the altercation with the floor, and generally feeling my age! At which point, it may have become clear why I haven't blogged very much lately. Uh huh. I'm re-editing The Hesperides at the moment, and will write a short piece, Ignis Fatuus, before launching into another novel. Fingers crossed -- because I really do need some cash to start flowing. 

Otherwise, I'm in reasonable health, as are the rest of us. Dave is off to Melrose, South Flinders Ranges, on Friday, to ride a couple of cycle events. Mike is cranking along with writing and selling short fiction. Zolie is fine, and the Indian summer is in the process of winding down into winter. I just need to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and give myself a good shake, get my life together and my mind back into gear. 

On that note, I'll close this post. I could ramble for pages, but there's nothing more to add that wouldn't involve the aforementioned whinging! And I shall try to return to the blog and keep pace with myself more frequently...

The artistic oars are back in the water!

 

The Hulk ... the new supercomputer ... might have been installed before Christmas, but I'd made myself a promise (sworn an oath). I would finish the novel before I got back into art -- meaning, I would edit it right to the end; which of course means editing about eight times. I'd hoped to finish by New Year, but "stuff" happened. It often does! In fact, I got Dark is The Valley finished on about January 10th, and am now on my break before I tackle Pet Shop Dragons, the full novelization from the screen story, which spun off the short story, LOL. 

So for the moment it's all about art, and I'm making inroads on an awful lot of learning which will have to be done before I can say the oars are 100% back in the water. At the moment, I'd give myself something like 40%. I'm functional in DAZ Studio 4.15, if you don't count dForce, which I've never even attempted. Must get into that soon. I'm far less happy with Affinity Photo, which was intended to replace Photoshop. It just doesn't have the tools to do what I need to do -- more of them are available in Krita, but then again, Krita is lacking a number of the tools available in Affinity. Grrr. So right now, I'm bouncing back and forth, round and round, using the Windows clipboard, and the images have a kinds of boomerang quality as they're passed into this prog, then that one, then the other one, to get even close to the functionality one had in Photoshop Elements 9, all those years ago. 

But yes, art is happening. At the same time, I've commenced the cataloging and reinstallation of the 3D content I've amassed since I started in 2009, and this is a monstrous job. It'll take a month or more to get everything in and accessible. I should think, by about the end of February, I'll be as productive as I used to be, and of course the quality of the work will be vastly better, because I'm using the Generation 8 figures, by and large ... and they do make a colossal difference; as does the NVIDIA Iray engine.

Happy, happy! 

Silver Certificate! We're doing something right!

 

We must be doing something right -- I made it all the way to Silver in the Writers of The Future Competition. The story this time is Memory Tree, which I hope to see published next year, though it hasn't found a berth yet. Patience. 

With Dark is The Valley complete, it's time to decide on which project to run with next. And the more I think about it, the more I think Pet Shop Dragons is the way to go. Not the short story version ... the full on development, as novelized from the screen story. Yes, I think we'll go that way next. 

(This image, below, isn't from Pet Shop Dragons, but I always liked it -- Mage's Pet. It features the character I created, "Consulting Mage." And I wonder if I can do something with that, too?!)

May Day. No, not an SOS, just May 1, and art is on my mind...

Rain is pattering as I write this, and the sky is low, heavy, gray. The drought might be in the process of breaking ... one can hope!
Most of what I'm doing right now is art, so art is on my mind (also photography, I admit). If I want to touch base with my personal blog here, I'd do best to upload a fair sampling of what I'm doing art-wise at the moment. I do want to touch base here, but there's nothing (else) to write about without delving into dental work and the occasional cafe break! So -- art it is. If a blog is intended to chronicle what's on one's mind, and what one is doing, well, this is where I am right now:

...I'm in DAZ Studio, Bryce, Terragen, Photoshop, and the images here are often done in all four. (A couple of those images are carrying 2015 etc. dates ... true: but these are rebalanced and refreshed versions of the older work, which is very contemporary.)

Everyone needs a hobby, and this is mine. It's a lot of fun ... and this is where my head is right now. A blog should reflect one's thoughts and state of mind, right? So -- there you are!