Web, Photography & Digital Art
I made this set of (almost) black and white sketches using one of my personal styles developed on Midjourney.
I like them. It is not only about dancers but also about frozen movements in a moment of grace and black-and-white contrast: they speak of passion, raw energy, precision and elegance. And why not, freedom.
Pity I have not a single space left on my walls 😀
How did I come to face such a feat?
First of all, for fun: I love making websites, that’s it. I had just completed a serious, demanding, challenging website – a historical archive – and needed to do something relaxing to rinse my brain… OK, that’s the truth, but not the whole truth: there was also a bit of commercial interest behind my resolution.
… disguised as a buyer, in order to find out why I was selling so little on them – well, I actually did sell something there, but not enough to deserve any serious time or toil. I focused on the most obvious form of POD: the art that one hangs on the wall.
would I buy anything that expensive myself? Definitely not! Unless perhaps in case of love at first sight, but that seldom happens.
Greed may certainly play a role in setting those high prices, but there must be something more to it. Let’s give it a thought:
First question: why should one buy a framed work of art somewhere halfway around the world and pay the outrageous shipping costs, when the bare printout would travel much cheaper and faster in a cardboard tube?
Then all it would take is a walk to the do-it-yourself shop around the corner to have it framed according to one’s taste, in a self-chosen frame, maybe also with a sheet of real glass (rather than those horrible acrylic substitutes that would survive the shipping). Which would save about 3/4 of the total cost.
But that’s not all.
Second question(s):
who prints the work of art you choose, and on what paper, and what kind of printer do they use? Most of the times the colors you see on your monitor don’t look very much like those you see printed on paper. Who checks the color rendition? And the diffusion effect? And the overall quality of the finished work?
of course the POD website gets the lion’s share, but also the printers must have their slice of the pie, and the packagers, and the shipment company… what’s left for the author is but laughable pocket change 🙁
Which encouraged briefly the sneaky temptation to bypass at least the POD sites and go directly to those sites that offer printing&shipment as a service… but alas, nothing doing: unguaranteed printing quality, long or very long processing times (up to 2 weeks!)… better forget it.
All of the above looks pretty disheartening, but I’m stubborn: my glorious printer can handle up to A3+ paper sheets (13” x 19”), quite a respectable size for a picture on the wall. A high-quality printing on it takes a mere couple of minutes of my time. I’m free to choose the best possible paper with the right grammage, texture and consistency. I have an encouraging constant number of visitors who show up in my websites, thus there’s no need for advertising…
So why not?
If it works, fine. And if it doesn’t, at least I learnt something new and had my fun 🙂
As a matter of fact I already had a lot of fun thinking of what would fit best on a wall and devising the proper mockup images to convey the mood to my visitors – here too MidJourney, adequately flogged and directed, proved to be a great limitless resource.
Death and taxes are notoriously inevitable, and in this case the taxes were the belle of the ball: I had to comply with the EU legislation on VAT applied to member states, which makes a sharp distinction between digital goods (images made of impalpable bits) and tangible objects (images printed on palpable paper), thus taxing them slightly differently – bureaucrats love to wallow in such byzantine subtleties. Fortunately enough I have several websites, so I can place the impalpable stuff on one of them and the palpable stuff on another.
While I was at it I also designed a couple of sets of author-signed tarots to be printed on demand. It posed some challenges such as finding out the proper paper, learning how to laminate it, improvising a device to cut them out precisely by hand and round up the corners comme il faut, finding the right boxes to dress them up appropriately for their travel to the customer… live and learn 🙂
Have a look at them – you’ll find an (almost) classical deck as well as a retro-steampunk one with a pinch of humor scattered here and there – the latter, I confess, being definitely my favorite 😀
A new collection of Gameover’s Atelier: VIPs from the past
Every graveyard is full of irreplaceable persons who will never be forgotten – or at least that’s what one may read carved on their headstones. In fact though within a few generations those mossy inscriptions will be all what’s left of them.
Only a few exceptional people manage to escape such almost inevitable fate: centuries or even millennia after their bodies have turned to dust, their names and deeds are still unforgotten, permanently engraved on something much more durable than a stone: history.
To some of them the humankind is heavily indebted because they brought into being brilliant ideas, discoveries, inventions or insights that enhanced deeply the quality of our lives and our way of seeing the universe that surrounds us. But, alas, not all of them: others will never be forgotten because of the trail of blood they left behind, and their names will be forever accursed for trying to fulfill their monstrous ambitions by walking on corpses.
Others still will be remembered eternally for things they never did – for the simple reason that they never existed other than as figments of an artist’s imagination: think of Hamlet, of the Minotaur, of Sherlock Holmes, of Prometheus… and nonetheless we see them as if they had been real people from a past we never saw.
Yes, life is bizarre…
For some of months I’ve been privately experimenting with Midjourney, and I’m constantly witnessing an enthralling, almost incredible evolution. As I’m using it quite intensively (2638 images generated so far) I’ve reason to believe that I’m also partaking in its ‘training’ 🙂
That’s a big word and IMO applying it to today’s AI would (still) be a gross overkill. However in those three months the improvement in composition and quality of the outcome were really astonishing – the ‘thing’ is definitely growing up and learning a lot!
As it may be expected, pretty often there’s plenty of post-processing and upscaling work to do and you end up with an image quite different from the original one. But not always. Sometimes all you need to do is to prompt the bot with the proper wording over and again until you like it, and then to touch up the final outcome just a little: in the end you find yourself thinking “OMG, that’s exactly what I had in mind!”.
I’ve read a lot about millions (or billions) of images being ‘stolen’ from their creators to train the AI – implying that everyone should be entitled to the correspondent royalties. But is it really theft, or are those images just used as machine-learning to point the AI towards some kind of independent creativity?
I’d rather go with the latter, also in view of the incredibly fast evolution of Midjourney.
Think for a moment: when you take a pic of a cathedral do you really wonder if you should pay a royalty to the bishop, or maybe to the architect who designed it? And does such a thought bother you when you photograph the work of a painter from the past, or a car whose logo you’ll remove in the post-processing, or someone on the street who agrees to it with a smile?
Now don’t you tell me that you aren’t drawing inspiration from somewhere when you create a work of your own – maybe from dozens of watermarked images, or from the pictures on an ancient book, or from a scene you just saw and found worth using, or, or…
Drawing inspiration is a human quality and this sort of empathy is the very base of creativity: you create from the world that surrounds you – no world, no creation.
I’ll agree, it’s quite disconcerting, even disturbing, to apply such concepts to a non-human entity, a mere ‘thing’ made of metal and silicon chips. But we shouldn’t forget that this ‘thing’ has been designed and made by humans, and humans are those who use it as the tool it is.
Setting aside philosophy, since this kind of images of mine were received well by Adobe and started selling promisingly I selected some and uploaded them to my Gameover’s Atelier. For the time being I limited my choice to simple subjects that I however find attractive and looked at from an unusual point of view. Should anyone be interested, they can be purchased pretty cheap – outrageously cheap indeed (50% down!) if bought before coming Christmas 😀
I had plenty of fun choosing and commenting them, and I’ll keep adding more and more every day.
Note: the opening image on top was initially created by me with Midjourney’s bot and carefully touched up. The Florentine merchant depicted there doesn’t exist and never did; nor can you buy a “Pear Computer”, to the best of my knowledge 🙂
