Joseph King-Smith 08/12/2024 Joseph King-Smith 08/12/2024

Using Software as a Creative Tool

In a previous blog post I wrote about how I am not remotely interested in AI generated art, I find it soulless and uninspiring. Perfectly rendered fire-breathing ogres, heroic unicorns and fairy dust may have their place (Pembrokeshire!?) but it’s largely not for me. The fool’s errand, though, would be to ignore emerging technologies entirely, deciding that it has nothing to offer at all.

In a previous blog post I wrote about how I am not interested in AI generated art, I find it soulless and uninspiring. Perfectly rendered fire-breathing ogres, heroic unicorns and fairy dust may have their place (Pembrokeshire!?) but it’s largely not for me. The fool’s errand, though, would be to ignore emerging technologies entirely, deciding that it has nothing to offer at all. Part of an artist’s job is to incorporate potentially useful elements of new tech with caution, not ignore them. Drawing and painting by hand can be just the starting point, especially if a version of the work will exist online eventually.

The first image above is a photograph of an initial drawing I did a few years ago in preparation for a painting, made using pencil and ball point pen.

Using freely available software I’ve adjusted the original image by removing the support (notebook paper) and tidying up the edges. AI comes into play in the initial stages as it can identify much of the support and deletes it. Anything selected by the software to be removed which in fact you want to keep can be de-selected, but this is imperfect and some smaller areas are inevitably missed. The fainter lines (pencil) which are too similar in shade to the support for the software to distinguish get removed, leaving faded sections. I quite like the effect and think of it as the digital equivalent of wear and tear, a play between the human and the artificial. The drawing becomes part my work and part the work of the software, I accept that and embrace it. The original drawing is different even from the first photograph as it exists in the physical world and has not been affected by the filter of a digital camera.

When photographing artwork on a flat surface it is nearly impossible to capture it accurately. Minute variations in colour and tone are caused by the ambient light hitting the surface. Any slight adjustment in the viewer’s position changes where and how the light behaves on it from their perspective. These variations are captured in the photograph with the camera itself inevitably adding its own colouration. The larger the subject the more light variation, this is why it’s so difficult to take accurate photos of artwork.

Once I have a digital image of the piece I can adjust the colour, size and orientation as well as combine elements from other drawings in a new composition entirely (see below). This is as far as I would want to take the software in aiding my visual art.

abstract digital drawing by King Toe Junior — ***Compound***

A new series of prints of my three Nucleus paintings is currently in production. They are images of the paintings which I have digitally optimised and enhanced then printed onto photographic paper with a high quality matt finish. They are then mounted and framed behind glass. The resulting prints (including mount and frame) are 60% smaller than the original paintings and so individually are likely to be one piece of a larger patchwork of artwork hung on the same wall. In contrast, due to their size (100 x 100cm) the individual paintings will in most situations be the centrepiece.