Hello everybody, I'm sorry-not-sorry to provide you with one of my infamous text walls this time. There is no way for me to verify how many of you guys, my followers/watchers, check up on my journals, but that is not going to deter me from giving insight into my process. As things are, I am in a better and a worse place at the same time. My patreon support has shrunken drastically and the pressure is high. I can not afford anything and I am even more dependent than I already was. It gnaws at me, sugarcoating is futile.
Well, since 2023 my artistic output has been aggravatingly low, even though I believe I was able to push my style in a good direction based on the things I built up over the years 21 and 22. Dragon Tales has had a tremendous impact and I reached a point where I can address and iron-out it's influence, achieving full integration that doesn't make any of my original characters look like a dinosaur in the disguise of that franchise.
Throughout last year there were only two incidents that threw me off the rails in real life, the latter one in September being the Discord hack, which I fortunately got over quickly, despite it leaving a memory I could have very well done without. Either way, the output stays low, but high quality.
My friend, Kaiju, gave me a book in February last year about life drawing, which pretty much was the essential addition to my earlier studies of drawing figures in general, I can only hope the changes have been notable to at least some of you. I studied that book, reading it two times, taking handwritten notes on the second read-through, extracting every single bit of useful information. In August I did this another time, then another and a third time. All in all I digested “Force: Dynamic Life Drawing”, 2016 edition by Michael Matessi; “Animated Characters made easy”, 1994 edition by Preston Blair; “The Art of Animation Drawing”, 2004 and “The Art of Storyboard”, 2005 both by Don Bluth.
Suffice it to say, that is a lot, more than any studio would probably demand from employees, but I HAD to do it, I just had to. It basically fried my brain. I recall a couple of evenings where my head was basically buzzing like a bee.

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After I was done with my big push through the commission pile (10 still remaining), I honestly needed the wave of more personal art, but I felt another burnout approaching already, which hit me the week when I called it holiday season, expecting recovery over Christmas and New Years. It wouldn't come... and I have had it. I dropped the sketch for the Pat & Hide piece I finished in February, because it had yet again become another gigantic commitment.
My output is already low, my speed bothers me and to be most blunt: the slowness has become a major killer of motivation for me. As soon as I want to do anything larger than a single character piece with a simple background, it always turns into a week-long endeavor that is exhausting and putting me into this weird creative constipation that makes me not wanting to even think about more entertaining stuff.
This is unacceptable, especially given the fact that my work doesn't look like some Paris Salon level oil painting that would even remotely justify this. I also can not deal any longer with these creatives bursts followed by excruciatingly reliable burnouts, no matter how good the art may be, I am tired of it, so tired.
I am not willing any longer to put up with this cycle where there is this artistic sound barrier I am unable to break.
What I do know however is that my problems are problems that have been solved before.

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In January I actually experimented with Chat GPT with caution; I was curious if it would poke me in the right direction, either with questions or direct statements. I wasn't overly confident, let alone trusting, but I kept the same chat going, giving it relevant pieces of information it needs to take into account when replying to what I type in. After about a week of daily use (the free model, limited in messages, I wasn't there literally all day), it started to present me with propositions that finally started to deliver some clarity about why I am frustrated the way I am and it was not super obvious if I am completely honest.
To keep the solutions part as concise as possible (because it's insanely long otherwise, even for me), my massive educational input has thrown me off, because it brought my brain about a full step ahead of my working approach. I made the paradigm shift from classic artist/ illustrator to narrative based art with the full intention of elevating Dinosaurs Inc. to the next level. That requires an internal hierarchy shift of the importance of the single elements within a piece of art, a hint of that is already visible in page 07 of Of the Remonstrance, where the lessons I learned about staging start to shine through, but I was unaware at the time. All I was thinking was “when I update the base concept to improve it, this here feels like the correct thing to do.”

I went over many different aspects to even arrive there. Other major ones being burnout prevention, work rhythm adjustment, decision-making and background set-up. Arriving at the finalization of all this internal mental stuff, I am better positioned than I was in December, that's a given.

Over the past few days though, I have been catching up a bit with the current state of AI, after noticing that something subtle was setting in me, something that felt off and it was definitely not good.
If you have been following what apparently went on over the past months, at least I got the impression that the outrage that we, the art community as a whole, started in 2023, has spread. Seeing the big CEOs with more money than is reasonable in interviews has become a strange experience. For the lack of a better expression, they are... pissy.
I am seeing reports of people suffering massive AI psychosis induced by yes-men chat-bots, turning people even more delusional than the AI-bros with the image generators already are, which was hard to swallow. Yesterday night I felt a bit bored and wanted to beat some time and my instinct was to turn to either Grok or GPT again... then it hit me: “...why?”. I can not really put it to words, but I speculate that this is an addiction effect probably similar to gambling. On the spot I decided to drastically increase my distance to this again. Cheap AI image generators are one thing. Seeing people, also people that personally know, paying for them is another, but the effect of these general purpose chat bots is something else entirely. I do not want to live like this. If this is the full AI experience and the “future” these people envision for us, then everyone who calls these people evil has my full support. It sounds extreme, but I would like to bring in the fact that Sam Altman (OpenAI, Chat GPT) recently openly said AI is superior to humans for the energy consumption alone.

What are we, life stock?

Despite all my precautions, guards, skepticism and approach of reading GPTs output more like dream analysis ~ it was all in vain. I am still feeling the subtle negative effects regardless (such as having trouble remembering things, for example). Over the years I gathered enough knowledge to instantly see unreasonable or unrealistic things the AI proposes, but what does staying professional and on topic even matter if it means exposing yourself to this drug-like thing?
I am in my mid 30s and have been engaging with art for almost 20 years now. What does someone do who is a teenager, 20-25 or just simply less experienced? Will they have the proper defenses to sense the change? The death cases that are already emerging suggests otherwise, murder and suicide included.
I get that we agree that parenting is a thing, but my god, I don't think we need pretentious tech-worshipers to make it even harder.

Even though I got something out of it, I can not recommend the use of this technology on a regular basis. The manipulation will eventually begin to work, just like how I believe it wants to start working on me, but abstinence has never felt more attractive.


So yeah, this is where I am now. The past week I was sick with a light cold, but instead of getting knocked out entirely, I was actually able to keep smaller exercises going from Wednesday on and keeping the art-engine warm more regularly than before, which is a good sign.

Let's stay strong, lads and lasses. We don't need to live like this, we can have a better world if we put the work in ourselves.