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. 

New Year, which brings more robots...

Coming back from a short break over the Holidays, and I am digging back into Vizcom as a tool to refine existing drawings, make them fresh again, and in some cases, make them more complete than they were before. In this case, I had an old iPhone drawing that I had done that I was never quite satisfied with, so I re-rendered in Vizcom, and then painted over in SketchbookPro. 

Update on Friday, January 5, 2024 at 2:55PM by Matthew Seydel Connors

Here was the original drawing that I started with, mainly Sketchbook on an iPhone.

AI Paintover Tutorial Series

About a month ago, I gave a presentation at my company, the Volvo Group, on generative AI tools. I will post the video of the presentation, but in preparation, I also made a series of videos showing off some generative AI tools, and then methods of editing the 2d content in mostly Photoshop and SketchbookPro. 

Inktober 2023

I have been participating in Inktober, the challenge started by illustrator Jake Parker, for some years now. The idea is pretty simple, there is a list of daily prompts that you can use as inspiration, and then you make a drawing every day.

My own interpretation has been more loose: though I do try to have about half of the drawing in ink, I also like to use digital and even VR tools. What I noticed this year is that as I posted images to Flicr, in some cases, when I used even an AI render engine on a drawing that I made IRL, some people got a little upset. People are very upset that AI will take over the creation of art, and I am in the minority of artists that are trying to find a balance between traditional and AI tools. 

This 'Castle' was inspired by a recent trip to Poland for work, where I stayed in a manor house just outside of Wroclaw for a work retreat for a few days. It reminded me of Italy, which resulted in the drawing above. 

A few other Inktober images were done completely in my sketchbook, with a mixture of watercolor pencils and crayons to add color and depth. 

For a few of the days, I used virtual reality tools such as Kingspray Graffiti, using an image that I had sketched as a resource in the application. 

Where I seemed to cross the line in some people's minds, was to use Gravity Sketch to make 3d models in VR, then use an AI render engine to add details, then finsih 'by hand' digitally in Sketchbook Pro on my PC with an XP-Pen screen tablet. 

The start of my AI journey...

And to continue the backpedaling through what I have been doing creatively, I first started dabbling with AI image engines in late 2022, when I saw a presentation as part of a Gravity Sketch online conference, talking about using various AI models as inspiration. One that really caught my eye was ArtBreeder, which you can 'train' with your own images. I found the online interface interesting, almost like a game from the early 2000s, and then the results had me hooked. The results were a high enough resolution to be able to do a paintover in Photoshop or SketchbookPro, my fave 2d raster tools.