Greetings, fellow artists, art-collectors and the Hive community.
We would like this post to serve as a small summary of the few completed collections/pieces we have done so far. Twitter is not, to say the least, the best platform for exhibition, but it is only there that we have been most active.
We'll begin at the beginning.
Cyclus Renascentiae.
See Gallery page.
This collection was born out of the frustrating attempts of both of us to learn how to use prompts to get what we want. In our first article here on Hive, we described one of the ways in which an artist can use A.I. to create art: through pure curation/editing of your own prompts. This is how we created Cyclus, though we didn't quite know what we were doing at the time.
We just saw something we liked, and the seed of an idea was born. In this case, almost literally: Utero was that piece, which we called 'seed' as a WIP title. (Appropriate since a "seed" (a unique number) is also what A.I. art generators use to initialise the generation of an individual image.)
Once we had the idea/concept, we could start to write prompts and curate results in order to get results that were closer and closer to what we had in mind.
Every time we liked something, we'd reroll that specific result. Results obviously varied wildly. Sometimes it would take dozens or hundreds of rerolls + prompt tweaks to finally find what we were looking for. Other times, one of the very first iterations was perfect and we only needed to reroll to confirm that suspicion.
Here you can see this in practice for "Solacium":
And so it went for each piece in the series. We stopped at nine because it felt complete at nine. After each piece, we knew we needed another part of the story - until "Solus", which we immediately perceived as the final, closing piece.
And finally, of course, there was Photoshop: colour correction and editing/removal of malformations, artifacts and bits that just didn't make sense. The descriptions also mostly came at the end, but not entirely... As each piece was made, notes were taken and the story evolved.
After completing "Cyclus Renascentiae", both of us being big AsyncArt fans, we decided to create a piece for it using the Day/Night template. After some thought, we decided we wanted not to create two pieces in the same space and different times, but rather, the same time but in different spaces, or "dimensions". Two alternate realities, that is.
Thus, "Our Cryptonian Future" was created. It shows a distant future cityscape - one dystopian and the other utopian - and it simply asks, which future are we creating, with all our tech?
Its description: The only certainty is change: A walk into the future which we discover doesn't exist. In its place, we find, is the present - different from what we knew. An ever-changing landscape of our own design. Since the dawn of blockchains and artificial intelligence, the kind of future we could only imagine is now approaching, faster and more real than ever before. The nature of that future is up to us.
Shortly after that, we realised how much fun it would be to create an AsyncArt blueprint using A.I. and immediately got started with "Mary Shelley's Notebook".
We have talked extensively about this blueprint collection in two previous articles:
🔸Mary Shelley's Notebook - An AsyncArt Blueprint made 100% with A.I.
.. in which we go into the creation process, and
🔸Mary Shelley's Notebook - A Deeper Look Into the Art
in which we talk about the essence of the artwork. Please do bookmark them both for later reading.
We intended to add sneak-peeks of the two series of works we are currently working on but perhaps it's better to leave that for another post =) ...
We have relatively little work to show, we know, considering the usual pace of A.I. artists (and that we started in October 2022) but that is by design. We believe it is important not to be blinded by the ubiquitous, surface veneer of beauty every above-average prompt result has, and instead create with purpose.
All we mean by that is, we want most of the art we mint to be work we feel extremely proud of - work that really comes from our creative cores and expresses parts of who we are and/or how we relate with the world.
We want to be able to look back at our body of work after many years and be able to say that none of it was a quick cash-grab or opportunistic exploitation of a passing craze.
Don't get us wrong, however: There's nothing wrong with sometimes incorporating a meme in one's work! In fact, meme-culture is undeniably huge and a whole movement of art has grown around it, with some artists working exclusively within it. That's truly fine, of course.
Just as A.I. has brought about a new movement in which almost anyone can start creating art with it (if they have the right tools and/or resources) - art of essentially infinite possibilities - with relative ease.
But it's all about context: Every artist has a story, and a history. If we (Alejandra Her and Mandelsage) suddenly started creating and selling dozens of A.I art pieces with themes wildly different from the work we've created before, or suddenly started including a Pepe frog somewhere in every piece - well, what would you think? We certainly wouldn't feel good about it.
Okay, that's all for now! Thank you for taking the time to read about us and our art <3 .. Have a great morning/afternoon/night!
