somenice

  • Coastal Mountain Forest Triptych

    A painting of Douglas Fir, framed in Douglas Fir.
    A painting of Western Hemlock, framed in Western Hemlock.
    A painting of Western Red Cedar, framed in Western Red Cedar.

    Often found growing together in the Coastal Mountain forest of British Columbia, these three species were inspiration to capture the texture and light of my local forest.
    The idea to frame each with their own type of wood came both as a natural idea but also because of materials at hand.

    Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, and Western Red Cedar
    Each has it’s own properties such as weight, grain, smell, and value.
    It’s this author’s belief that lumber and forestry can be a sustainable industry if well maintained. Hands off old growth! Selective forestry needs to be rewarded and raw log exports minimized.

    Each frame has been treated with LifeTime® Wood Treatment Non-Toxic Wood Stain. The result is a natural grain finish and each painting is adorned with a spot of forest lichen or moss.

    Canvas measurements are approximately 9″x12″ (23cm x 30 cm)
    With frame the hanging dimensions each measure 11 1/4″ x 14 1/4″ (28cm x 36cm)

    Coast Western Forest Triptych

    For Sale: Framed Coastal Mountain Forest Painting Triptych
    Artist: Andrew Smith
    Price $6,600

  • Cloth Simulation with Procedural Plaid

    Procedural cloth with plaid material. Made with Blender

    This was fun, because how can you have too much plaid?
    Thanks to Ryan King Art on Youtube for the Blender tutorial series on material nodes. His tutorials are great and I appreciate the effort in his editing. Support him if you can.

    I often joke that I’ve learned Blender 3D every year for the last 20 years. Sometimes because I forgot what I previously learned and don’t use it frequently but more often it’s because a new release offers new tools and capabilities.
    The development has seen major changes to the UI and entire interface in recent years.
    The latest have been geometry and material or shader nodes. A way to procedurally or programatically link blocks, each affecting the output in a chain. Either to create geometry or to produce any desired material. Plaid in this case.
    A previous post shows another example using nodes to create and animate fake trees.

    A Blender 3D Material Nodes example

    It can get messy and may look confusing but when grouped the key attributes are easily accessed and changed. It makes sense that the Blender Add-On called “Node Wrangler” comes in handy.

    Blender is a free and open source 3D application, completely extendable using Python. It continually delivers updated features and is capable of producing amazing compositing/animation/video/3D printing, you name it. (I do miss the game engine)

    If you’re looking to learn 3D I highly recommend Blender 3D
    And again look for Ryan King Art on Youtube for plenty of beginner tutorials.

  • Generative Fill or Degenerate Phil

    Generative fill in Adobe Photoshop (beta) is a pretty amazing tool to extend images. Background artists, web designers, print layout artists, or anybody who deals with incorrect aspect ratios or odd image dimentions will be thrilled by the output.

    The image below represents a photo I took near Iceberg Lake in Whistler BC. Portrait aspect on 1920×1080 canvas.

    source image to adobe photoshop generative fill

    To extend the image CTRL+SELECT image.
    Select Inverse – COMMAND+SHIFT+I
    SELECT > MODIFY > EXPAND – 3px
    EDIT > Generative Fill…. (No Prompts)

    En Voila! a landscape that does not exists.
    Notice how it recognizes the light source, maintains correct shadows, tones and palette.

    2/3 of this image is created by AI

    Two thirds of the above image was created by AI/ML yet the middle remains completely untouched and my creation. Does this mean the image was “generated by AI”? “Enhanced by AI”? “Extended by AI”?
    Or just fake?

    Prompts allow for text based editing and generation with mixed results. Note that prompts will only add to the selection. In this case outside of the main image here.
    Ultimately however it finally gets classified, anyone looking to extend beyond an image will be happily surprised with the results of Generative Fill.

    “Degenerate Phil” on the other hand… t

    Degenerate Phil

    Text prompt “Degenerate Phil” creates some nightmare fuel.
    Nighty-night.

    Generative AI is neither good nor evil. It’s up to you, the human in the loop, to decide.

  • AI Art is getting better

    AI created mountain scene

    Adobe Firefly Express (beta) whatever “Text to Image” takes the old Colab Notebooks to a new refined level.
    However it’s still easy to cherry-pick “good” images for every 10 mediocre or just plain wrong images.

    Don’t trust the robots. PEACE. T.AKE IT IT ELASY!

    * All images above generated by Adobe “text to image” software.

    [EDIT]
    I’m crossing the streams. OpenAI conversation where I phrase bomb “T.AKE IT IT ELASY”. A generated text-to-image response for “Take it easy”
    Would this be considered adversarial AI?

    OPENAI conversation - adding phrase "T.AKE ITT ELASY" which was generated by text to image "Take it easy".

  • Mammoth Mountain Logo

    Ooof. Hard to believe this would have passed all the checks and balances to get appropriated approved.

    It’s not a stretch to say that a California ski resort has naively combined two M’s to form a crown but to outright copy a symbol used repeatedly by one of the highest selling artists of all time seems ridiculous.

    RIP King. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988)