There's this story I've been trying to tell for years. The better part of a decade now. I've always been one to latch onto ideas for years at a time, but this one is surely the most enduring. As an ongoing project, I think it's safe to say that this is my life's work as an artist. And yet, only two people in my life know about it in any detail.

More recently, I've been trying to change that, but I've been struggling. It took me a very long time to build up the confidence to start sharing it with others, even in a small way. Today, I think I believe that I'm a good artist, in the sense that I personally like the art that I make. Still, looking back on all the stuff I've made for it, I feel that some of it works, and some of it doesn't. Some of it doesn't really capture the vision. Some of that comes from the fact that the vision has shifted quite a bit since I started working on it, but there's more to it than that.

Recently, I've come to the conclusion that I essentially lack the skill to realize my vision for this project.

I don't think that comes from a place of self-deprecation either. In general, I feel like over the last few years, I've kind of plateaued as an artist. I tend to draw the same kinds of things over and over again and rarely get out of my comfort zone. It doesn't help that I've also worked and studied full time which makes it hard to spend much time working on it. I haven't prioritized it, like I have with writing at times. But even then, surely doing the same thing over and over won't help you grow as an artist.

For example, recently I tried working on something else. I've had this idea for a story about a software developer fleeing a wildfire for a while, and I wanted to try telling it as a webcomic. Most of the art I do is in black and white. I didn't feel like that would capture the vibe of what I was going for with this; there's a lot of visual storytelling you can do with colour in a world inundated with smoke. So, I decided to do something in colour for once. And MAN was it hard. Honestly picking out colours that I felt worked together was probably the hardest part. It occurred to me that I hadn't done any painting in colour in years. When I look back on the stuff I did in high school, which tended to be more colourful, I found that a lot of it was very jarring. It seems like I realized that at some point, and rather than try to learn how to use colour correctly, I got really obsessed with monochromaticism instead.

So yeah. While I do like my own art, at some point I have to admit to my self that there is art I do or have done that actually kind of sucks. The art I haven't shared with anyone. The stuff that doesn't capture the vision I'm going for, because it's constrained technically by the things I don't know how to do. It's bad not because it's morally wrong but rather because I've failed and/or refused to learn and grow from it.

It's there I realized with terror that I am the kind of person products like Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are marketed towards.

I've been thinking a lot about that recently. To say it up front, I do not use generative AI tools in any creative work, or at all really. I think the strongest argument against using generative AI in creative work is an argument from ethics, but I also think that's kind of table stakes for anyone reading this. Beyond that, if I were to use generative AI to bridge my gap between vision and skill, assuming it worked at all, and assuming it actually looked good (two implausible assertions themselves), whatever I could create would be somehow spiritually depraved.

The value proposition of these products is that you can "create art" from nothing but a vision, so long as you can describe it. Yes, there is "technique" that goes into creating prompts to get a certain kind of art, but if I was to engage with that as a kind of art form, it's not an art form I want anything to do with (not the least because of the ethics). These products are specifically sold as art creation without process—a mere instantiation of an idea or vision. Maybe that's suitable for a world of pure representational soup, but I think it's worth pushing back on that. The world is not mere representations. It's one thing to simplify a process. Krita saves me having to go to the art store to get supplies. But to do away with the process entirely doesn't sit right with me. I can't help but feel that the process is as important as the vision itself, even if nobody else will ever see it. If nothing else, it affects me. My whole life consists of processes of transformation. If none of that matters, I might as well already be dead.

Fortunately for me, there is something concrete I can do to work towards realizing my vision: practice. Get out of my comfort zone. I think I've come to peace with the fact that I've got a long ways to go before realizing this project the way I want. I've got lots of time to learn, and I do think I'll enjoy the process. Maybe another decade from now I'll have something to show for it.

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