Hello all you lovely Lords and Ladies,

I have been testing the waters with some AI art, just dabbling to see if it can be useful in some aspects of Manaworld, and have decided to make a section where I can post some of the work I have produced from these exercises. Many of these are questions from Fans from ASK SYX on Discord and Patreon.

You can find them: HERE

Now, I know there is a lot of hatred toward AI art and just wanted to give you a brief breakdown of my views. (And I will try and be very brief) :D

I'm a bit older and so I was around before there were computers in every home. When phones were phones and cameras were cameras. I was literally in "comic book art school" for the first stages of computer coloring. I used to have to take COMIC BOOK HAND LETTERING classes. We had "swipe files" in classes/in our studios where we would have filing cabinets full of reference pictures from magazines, books, and artists before you could enter in a google search. I recall a hatred toward airbrushing! I was around for the birth of VCRs, video games, the internet! (yep, I'm an oldmen)

So I have heard ALL of these arguments (directly related to art, specifically COMIC BOOK ART.)
How you "lose the 'art' when computer coloring/lettering/photography. The computer does all the work. You are not a real artist if you use these tools."

And so many more.

And to some extent, I AGREE! Which is I know hypocritical! Because I use digital lettering, digital coloring, and a Cintiq/drawing pad. I use line correction in Clipstudio.

I understand the hate directed towards AI.

The AI work I am doing is for a variety of reasons. To learn how it works (Know your enemy).

I will use it to supplement other work that I simply don't have time to dedicate to. Such as ASK SYX. Artwork for the LITE NOVELS which I sincerely LOVE doing writing. But these are something I can't afford to spend crazy amounts of money on. (Not that I won't have professional artists working on some of the Pay Off Shots in the Lite Novels, but each illustration is quite expensive in my MW budget.)

I'm still producing the Main Comics, Side Comics, etc at the same rate as before which have "actual art" in them. So if you don't like the AI stuff I totally understand but hopefully you can ignore that aspect if it doesn't appeal to you and still enjoy what you did before about Manaworld.

Even with the AI work that I have been playing around with I don't just hit a prompt and that's it. I take drawings I've done, or generated images, draw over them, then run them through again and again, and again, cleaning up a bit more, changing and redrawing each time. Each final usually averages like 120 generations and lots of tweaking and repainting until I'm satisfied. So I hope you don't think "Scratch is just tossing this stuff out there."

tldr:

AI is a technology that isn't going away and I'd rather have some knowledge than be an ostrich for an advancing technology. I can yell at the ocean all day but it won't stop the tide.
As always thanks for being a fan. Not everything I do will appeal to everyone but I do my best.

Scratch