Inktober 2025 Artefacts Volume 1: Starfish Suit

The last few years, even while I am churning out drawings for Inktober, I always have a few that I wonder what I could with if I had just a little bit more time to spend on them. I started experimenting with AI tools for manipulation for the drawings, though I always feel like they need some further editing. This image started as a simple sketch of a starfish, but I felt like the starfish needed to transcend the limited mobility of its existence...so I made it more mobile. 

After Inktober ended, I felt like I could use Vizcom and a bit of digital 'overpainting' with Sketchbook Pro and my XP-Pen tablet monitor to flesh out the character further. The combination of SketchbookPro and the XP-Pen screen allows for a fairly simple interface that I can draw right onto.

The final version of the render from Vizcom with the edits looked like this:

Vizcom does an excellent job of preserving the overal shape and detail of a simple sketch, the text prompts are auto-generated and editable, and you have many render options. Maybe my favorite feature, though, is the ability to convert your render to a 3d object and then export it as an .fbx, .gltf, or .usd file that can be modified through 3d tools. I usually take it these exports into Blender, to check the scale and whether the texture map and overall geometry look ok; for this model, I repainted the faceplate in SketchbookPro for a new 3d output, as the starfish, though pretty detailed, was on the outside of the helmet, which was not what I wanted. With the newly exported .gltf, I decided to use Adobe Substance to just generate a .PNG file with the background knocked out so that I could make a composite in Photoshop using a Firefly-generated background with a prompt. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's interesting to see how AI tools can augment the conceptual process. 

Inktober 2025 Drawings

Every year, the drawing event of Inktober has me looking forward to the fall as I time when I can re-commit to making creativity and specifically drawing part of my daily life again. This Inktober event was started by Jake Parker years ago, and has a pretty simple set of rules, following the themes set for each day in October. 'Mustache' was the kick-off this year for Day 1, which was a fun way to start...

(I don't think that I will post all of the images here, just a few of my favorites)

Day 3 was 'Crown', so I did not want to be too obvious, but also not get too complicated on an early day. I have these great little watercolor card that first came in handy for this, with a generous amount of India ink.

About at day 6 for 'Pierce' I remembered that simple shapes can allow you to make a complex subject quickly...

Silo to Vizcom alien

A model that I started but felt a bit stalled on, until I took it into Vizcom as a render from Milo...

Open Blocks VR to Silo

Blocks was really clever and powerful 3d content creation tool in VR made by Google some years ago, but then was abandoned along with tools like Tilt Brush...yet they kept the bones of these tools Open Source for others to tinker with, and so, Open Blocks was born a few months ago. This rekindled my interest in content creation in VR, though I did end of modifying the scene somewhat through Silo 3d from Nevercenter. 

Open Blocks_Karl Wants Orange! by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

First update of 2025

It's been way too long since I have posted any of my artwork, and there's not really a good reason, other than life somethimes gets in the way, or priorities of my family and work came in front of updates. But it's definitely not due to being idels, as I have actually found that in the past year I have been fairly prolific with my artwork in a balanced way; tactile drawing and painting, some digital work, VR artworks, and quite a bit of dabbling with AI on my own creations. This video is made using Silo 3d, with Milo for rendering, then further re-render with Vizcom and then some Photoshop compositing.