Hi all!
Many years ago I made a book for my kid, called Brian the Lion. It started when I made up a story on the spot, during a car ride.
Brian was a lion, he was hungry, and despite politely asking several animals if he could eat them, they all declined. I wrote the story down, illustrated it with some clip art, printed it up for my kids, and that was that.
Fast forward several years, and with the use of new AI models that can redraw images with prompted styles, I decided to take another shot at it. Here is an example before and after.
I went through the whole thing and have a new copy here
Some thoughts on the experience:
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Deciding on a a visual style and figuring out how to prompt for it was tricky. I did a fair bit of browsing and then asking ChatGPT to describe the style before getting to a prompt I liked.
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Even then, getting consistent styles from image to image wasn't easy. Some images were very warm, some were cooler, some had a lot of texture, and subtle details like how they eyes were drawn changed from image to image.
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Some of the original Brian the Lion images were two page spreads, with the animals running away from the lion. The image generator would not make wide aspect ratio images for me.
Finally, I'm left to wonder whether this is art. Tentatively, I still say yes, because this is my story and the images are as I envisioned them, but I still have this sense of inauthenticity, like I've cheapened the work of illustrators who spent years honing their craft.
I enjoy drawing, but I don't draw well enough to achieve the same image quality that ChatGPT did. I'm not going to stop drawing though. The sketches I make in my notebook are as much about the experience of drawing and the focus it takes, as well as the memories I form around what I draw. Maybe the difference between the two is that the art in my notebooks is for me, whereas Brian the Lion is for others, and doesn't necessarily exist for it's own sake, but in service of the story.
Those are my thoughts.
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer