I’ve cancelled the auto renewal of my ArtStation pro account; I am paid up until April, and I hope Epic responds and protects the artistic community before then. 

An artist drawing inspiration from other artwork will take on board the elements of that artwork that they have an emotional response to. It’s not for immediate monetary gain, it’s part of the process of their own development. The result will be different, due to differing stroke techniques, other influences, differing skill levels etc. Good human artists draw on their surroundings, culture and experiences to bring personality to their work. The artistic community therefore evolves together; each generation iterates upon previous styles and techniques and bring new elements to it. This is how art has progressed for centuries. 

 AI on the other hand is fed artwork as data. There is no emotional aspect to this, and all it can do is combine and mix different data to produce a result. That data belongs to the artist or owner of the image, and in this case it’s been taken without consent and put into commercial products that can generate huge quantities of images in a short amount of time, without barriers such as skill, resources or indeed available free time. There will be no evolution without feeding in more data from human artists. This may change in time but currently what we call AI is not even a true AI, it’s advanced machine learning. The reason it can’t do hands well is because it has no concept of what a hand is; it’s just learned from the data that those types of shapes are often placed at that part of the human body. It doesn’t think or feel in the way we do. Therefore the argument that it is ‘inspired’ in the same way as human artists is wrong, and what we are looking at is purely data theft, not an artistic process. 

There are numerous other reasons why AI art should be kept off ArtStation, but until they address this first part, the conversation can’t really progress. I’m not against AI being used to make some tools more intelligent, or image creation being used for idea generation, but it needs to be done ethically, and ArtStation should be firmly on the side of the artists in this case.

Another quick sketch to try to build my drawing skills back up. Still feeling rusty and that I have a way to go to be where I want to be. That arm in particular… but just gonna keep moving on!

After neglecting drawing for so long, I’m going to make an effort in 2022 to get back into it, and maybe get some ideas for 3D projects along the way. I’ll post up some of the more successful ones on my blog but I’ve got a lot of cobwebs to get rid of! Here’s my first attempt :)

Hello! This week the theme was 'Legendary Traveling Stick Salesman' which to be honest I'd not heard of before, but this link kind of explains: https://the-adventures-of-stick-salesman.tumblr.com/

This one was hard as I was designing on the go. Again all done in Zbrush and sculpted. Full post with all 8 heads will be on my portfolio, and I'll post a video for this one soon.

Here's week 7, the theme was 'Trickster Thief' so I decided to skip doing a likeness this time and do a depiction of The Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens' Oliver instead. I've not really sculpted many children before and I'm aware it's tricky to do successfully so wanted to challenge myself a little. This one was quite a bit quicker than Captain Flint though, mainly due to time constraints and less complexity. Again all from scratch in Zbrush. No video this time unfortunately.

Better late than never! Here's week six, the likeness was actually pretty tricky here and I think it needs more time, but when is a speedsculpt no longer a speedsculpt? So leaving this here. I was so happy to have symmetry back on. This week the theme (set by Outgang Studio Discord) was pirate, so of course I had to dip back into Black Sails :) As with all of these, sculpted from scratch in Zbrush. And I have a video this week because 2021.6.2 is more stable! I'll upload in a day or two.

Thanks for viewing!  

Hello! This week's challenge was to sculpt a head with no symmetry enabled at all. It was hard, and super frustrating.

For the topic, I was kinda missing WandaVision so I decided to make Photon as maybe one day she may appear in the MCU. The likeness isn't quite there but I was happy just to get this to a certain point and then leave it be. I'm aware her head is maybe too big but I really needed to move on!

Everything here is again from spheres/primitives in Zbrush, and I didn't activate symmetry at any point for any element.

Zbrush 2021.6.1 seemed a little unstable so I lost a lot of bits of the movie of the process, I'll see what I can salvage.

Here's week 4! I wanted to use this as an opportunity to try modelling a bit of armour from spheres/primitives in Zbrush without using poly modelling (which is how I'd normally do it) so I ended up pushing it a little and spending an extra few hours. The theme (set by the Outgang Studio Discord challenge) was scarred warrior. I wanted to do a woman who was strong and capable.

Unfortunately Zbrush crashed later in the process so I don't have a full video for this. I'll see what I can salvage later. 

Week 3 of the challenge, the theme (set by the good people at Outgang Studio) was crime boss. I've done a few likenesses recently so decided to create a fictional character, and sculpted a 'realistic' take on the Penguin. This was huge fun, but I set myself quite a strict deadline so I wasn't spending more than an afternoon on it. Again started from a sphere. Hope you like it! 

Video will follow shortly.