Watch: AI Artist Reveals His Creation Process, Not As ‘Instant’ As It Looks
By Mikelle Leow, 08 May 2023
Art these days can be churned out in one click—this part is true. But to create something that’s compelling and personal, you’ll have to envision artificial intelligence as a material, much like you’ve always done with oils and the right paintbrushes.
An eye-opening video by Vox breaks down the workflow of the anonymous artist behind Stelfie, an alter-ego imagined as a selfie-taking time traveler. The feature challenges the belief that AI art creation is instantaneous and requires minimal talent. In fact, it took the creator a startling 17 hours to complete the one image shown in the video.
The artist, who had been painting with traditional canvases for about two decades before switching to digital art some five years ago, currently works with Stable Diffusion to bring his ideas to life.
He starts out with rough sketches, firming up a layout so the AI doesn’t sway his vision. Then, he uses the drawings to develop the right prompts for his art.
The process involves a lot of inpainting, in which you shade in specific areas to be edited out, and outpainting, where you get the bot to dream up what happens beyond the existing frame. The artist also utilizes Photoshop to alter the parts that the AI can’t get right.
Returning faces, like Stelfie here, are trained into a model. The artist first creates his characters in 3D and captures them in multiple angles, before feeding the images into the database. “So when you train a model, you save a keyword,” and every time you enter that keyword, the intended character appears.
Contrary to what people might think, he says Stable Diffusion only makes up about half of the finished product. The artist still has to turn to Photoshop for 40% of the fine-tuning, and Procreate for about 10%. Also, famous figures are hard to replicate on these art-generating tools, so he gets the AI to create lookalikes and retouches the physical appearances on Photoshop.
The video suggests that creating art with AI can be just as labor-intensive as with conventional techniques.
With regard to how AI will disrupt the industry, the artist says he’s not threatened in the slightest.
“I feel this is an opportunity—an opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we already have in digital art.”
[via Vox and Kottke, cover illustration 274940833 © Yupiramos Group | Dreamstime.com]