Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

 I wish all my readers a merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

May your home be filled with golden light, To chase away the chill of night. 

May every gift and every word, Be the sweetest things you’ve ever heard!

Talking mushrooms

 

I did the design for this mug a loong time ago. I used Inkscape for it, an open source alternative to adobe illustrator. There are some designs in my Zazzle shop I am still proud of - and this is one of it. You can look at it and think of a story - an old and experienced mushroom telling a younger one about the important part mushrooms play in the forest, for example. 

So you can use this mug to drink your morning tea and meditate a bit about mushrooms or just create your own story in your head. 

Talking mushrooms Mug
by ullahennig

Image to prompt - another way to use your old photos

 

The image on the left is an old photo, taken many years ago during a vacation in the Provence in the South of France.

I decided to play with it and uploaded the photo to generateprompt.ai in order to get a prompt for it. I got the following prompt:

"A historic Gothic-style church with an ornate facade and tall, pointed windows, featuring a tall, spire-topped steeple with a weather vane at the top. The church is situated in a European city square, with surrounding old buildings and a clear blue sky overhead. In the foreground, there is a fountain with a rectangular basin, and a few children playing in the square, along with two women walking nearby. The scene is bright and sunny, highlighting the architectural details of the church and the lively atmosphere of the square."

I then went to piclumen.ai and insert it. Here is the result:

Of course, the prompt you get when you upload the image can be changed - you might prefer a painting in a certain style, or leave out the fountain, or change the history setting. 

I am a traditonal artist and I love AI Art!

For quite some time I have been creating traditional art (mostly art done with alcoholbased markers) and AI Art. There have been days when I focussed on AI Art, and days when I focussed on traditional art. Yes, traditional art takes longer, I usually need one week for preparing the image, selecting the colors, colorblocking and then shading with inktense pencils and adding the background with acrylic ink. 

The image on the left however is the result of directly combining a traditionally painted piece with using AI to edit it. 

First of all I was not so happy with the result. It was okay, but does not belong to the pieces I am particularly proud of. So I was curious whether AI would come up with something more interesting when I asked it to turn the style of the piece into Art Deco style. And here it is!

 

The Beauty of Winter

No, winter in general is not my favorite season. I especially hate November with its short and often dreary days. December is better, with all the lights of the Christmas season. 

However there is beauty in winter - like in the image on the left. The crispiness of the frozen leaves in contrast to the red of the berries - looking at such an image makes me happy. With all those AI generators on the web I can easily create my happy version of winter!

Alcohol markers and acrylic ink

One of the advantages of Acrylic ink is that you can generate shades of the hue by simply adding water. The acrylic ink here was a burgundy refill for Molotow acrylic markers; By using the ink as it comes out of the bottle you get a quite dark brownish red. The more water you add the more pinkish the color gets. 

Alcohol markers on the other hand are flat; you can get some kind of shading by going over the same spot twice with the same marker, or, as I did in the last painting, by using inktense pencils on top of markers.

With this painting however I wanted to create a strong contrast between the acrylic ink background and the shapes painted with markers in the middle of the image. 
 

Explosion of colors

Oil pastels are a medium I do not use very often. I've got a set of them, but they are nicely stacked away. However, in the past, I have played with them. One of the results is the design on this round magnet. I love the vibrant colors and the movement which is expressed in the design. 

I did it a long time ago in 2012. The only digital step I took was to scan the painting and remove the background. No AI at that time whatsoever!

 

Explosion of Colours Magnet
by ullahennig