I rediscovered PicFinder AI

PicFinder AI was among the first AI Art generators I have been using. But with Nightcafe Studio, Ideogram AI and Mage Space I neglected it because most of the results I got weren't very satisfying. However now, almost one year later, I rediscovered PicFinder again. I found out something very important: PicFinder works best with longer prompts. What I am doing now is to go to Ideogram or Nightcafe Studio and look for one of my images there and then copy the magic prompt:

Here is the prompt:

A photo of an indoor jungle with a variety of tropical plants. There are large plants with big leaves, like palms and ferns. There are also smaller plants with colorful flowers. The plants are placed in pots of different sizes and shapes. The pots are arranged on wooden shelves, crates, and the ground. The background is a white wall with a few holes.

And here are two of the results. PicFinder offers you quite a lot of images, in square format, or landscape or portrait format.

The only disadvantage I see is that the free version of PicFinder only allows personal use. I do journaling, and I love to use stickers in my journal. PicFinder will work absolutely great here!

Acrylic inks and paintmarkers

A long time ago I ordered a set of acrylic paintmarkers from Amazon. In addition to that I've got some Molotow paintmarkers and a black Posca pen. I have to admit that I didn't use them a lot, and then, a few days ago I noticed that some of them had dried up. However I watched a video which taught me that it could help to exchange the tips. And yes, it did. So I decided to use them in addition to my acrylic inks to do some detail painting and drawing. 

 

Abstract painting done with Acrylic ink

Well, it's acrylic ink again! This time I did a pencil drawing first and then inked the drawing, and only then filled in the colors. It is a bit of a new procedure for me - I have been applying the colors rather spontaneously without thinking about the composition first. I think that I stick to this new way of painting. 

By the way I also also used craft paint in this painting, together with acrylic inks. The paint is called "Acrylini" and made by Rico Design. It is a soft body Acrylic paint out of a tiny bottle. 

Neocolor 2 - a review

 

After painting with Neocolor 2 for some time I decided to switch to Acrylic inks again. Yes, I had a blast painting with the watersoluble wax crayons. It is so easy to get access to a broad range of colors without having to mix them, and yes, you can mix them on the paper. You do not have to spend much time with preparations - just take the crayons or the dissolved pigment of the shavings and paint. Brushes are easily cleaned.

However, there is one disadvantage: It is almost not possible to apply marks with a gel pen or an ink pen afterwards because of the waxy and chalky surface the crayons create. With acrylic ink I do not have this kind of problem. And yes, acrylic inks are more difficult to mix. You can easily have too much of the dark color (especially black) if you are not careful. But I intend to get better at that by practicing.

Mage: Same prompt, two different prompt styles

Mage is one of my favorite AI Art Generators. One of its advantages is that it offers several packs of prompt styles. 

Here I used the prompt:

a beautiful purple flower in a dark forest, in the style of hyper-realistic sculptures, dark orange and green, post-apocalyptic backdrops, light red and yellow, museum gallery dioramas, soft, dreamy scenes, orange and green, surreal 8k zbrush render

and the prompt style: "Fauvism".

I created the image on the right with the same prompt, but changed the prompt style to "rococo".

The petals of the flower and the leaves looks quite different, the colours of the petals are orange and blue, and the flower is placed in the forest. 

By the way, I took the prompt from Lexica. Once offering a free account, Lexica now has to be paid if you want to create images. But you can still search for images and the respective prompts for free.

Smooshing the pigments

I tried another way to smoosh the pigments after applying the watersoluble wax crayons on the paper - Q-tips! Fortunately I've got a full box of Q-tips, and you need a lot of them. I just dip them into the water and then go over the dry crayons. Somehow I prefer this method to using a brush to disolve the pigments. 

I must say that I have a blast using my Neocolor II crayons! 

Neocolors II again!

Often enough I only need to watch one or two videos about a certain medium and I am off to fetch said medium and begin to paint.

So, after having painted with acrylics for a while I decided to paint with my Neocolor IIs (watersoluble wax crayons made by Caran d'Ache). There are various ways to use them: The painting on the left hand side was done with putting the shavings in a little container and wetting them with a drop of water. The crayons are very richly pigmented. Yes, it is difficult to layer them, but on the other hand you can easily mix your paints on the paper!