Category: Art

Coastal Mountain Forest Triptych

A painting of Douglas Fir, framed in Douglas Fir.
A painting of Western Hemlock, framed in Western Hemlock.
A painting of Western Red Cedar, framed in Western Red Cedar.

Often found growing together in the Coastal Mountain forest of British Columbia, these three species were inspiration to capture the texture and light of my local forest.
The idea to frame each with their own type of wood came both as a natural idea but also because of materials at hand.

Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, and Western Red Cedar
Each has it’s own properties such as weight, grain, smell, and value.
It’s this author’s belief that lumber and forestry can be a sustainable industry if well maintained. Hands off old growth! Selective forestry needs to be rewarded and raw log exports minimized.

Each frame has been treated with LifeTime® Wood Treatment Non-Toxic Wood Stain. The result is a natural grain finish and each painting is adorned with a spot of forest lichen or moss.

Canvas measurements are approximately 9″x12″ (23cm x 30 cm)
With frame the hanging dimensions each measure 11 1/4″ x 14 1/4″ (28cm x 36cm)

Coast Western Forest Triptych

For Sale: Framed Coastal Mountain Forest Painting Triptych
Artist: Andrew Smith
Price $6,600

Published
Categorized as Art

Generative Fill or Degenerate Phil

Generative fill in Adobe Photoshop (beta) is a pretty amazing tool to extend images. Background artists, web designers, print layout artists, or anybody who deals with incorrect aspect ratios or odd image dimentions will be thrilled by the output.

The image below represents a photo I took near Iceberg Lake in Whistler BC. Portrait aspect on 1920×1080 canvas.

source image to adobe photoshop generative fill

To extend the image CTRL+SELECT image.
Select Inverse – COMMAND+SHIFT+I
SELECT > MODIFY > EXPAND – 3px
EDIT > Generative Fill…. (No Prompts)

En Voila! a landscape that does not exists.
Notice how it recognizes the light source, maintains correct shadows, tones and palette.

2/3 of this image is created by AI

Two thirds of the above image was created by AI/ML yet the middle remains completely untouched and my creation. Does this mean the image was “generated by AI”? “Enhanced by AI”? “Extended by AI”?
Or just fake?

Prompts allow for text based editing and generation with mixed results. Note that prompts will only add to the selection. In this case outside of the main image here.
Ultimately however it finally gets classified, anyone looking to extend beyond an image will be happily surprised with the results of Generative Fill.

“Degenerate Phil” on the other hand… t

Degenerate Phil

Text prompt “Degenerate Phil” creates some nightmare fuel.
Nighty-night.

Generative AI is neither good nor evil. It’s up to you, the human in the loop, to decide.

AI Art is getting better

AI created mountain scene

Adobe Firefly Express (beta) whatever “Text to Image” takes the old Colab Notebooks to a new refined level.
However it’s still easy to cherry-pick “good” images for every 10 mediocre or just plain wrong images.

Don’t trust the robots. PEACE. T.AKE IT IT ELASY!

* All images above generated by Adobe “text to image” software.

[EDIT]
I’m crossing the streams. OpenAI conversation where I phrase bomb “T.AKE IT IT ELASY”. A generated text-to-image response for “Take it easy”
Would this be considered adversarial AI?

OPENAI conversation - adding phrase "T.AKE ITT ELASY" which was generated by text to image "Take it easy".
Published
Categorized as AI/ML, Art

Mammoth Mountain Logo

Ooof. Hard to believe this would have passed all the checks and balances to get appropriated approved.

It’s not a stretch to say that a California ski resort has naively combined two M’s to form a crown but to outright copy a symbol used repeatedly by one of the highest selling artists of all time seems ridiculous.

RIP King. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988)

“Big Flood” lightbox

Blue led animation in steel laser cut Coast Salish artwork

Using the Adafruit Adabox #017 I added leds and an e-ink display to a lasercut lightbox made of steel by Coast Salish artist Xwalacktun as a gift this year.

A miniature version of He-yay meymuy (Big Flood), it’s 30cm tall with an 11cm diameter. The original piece is an impressive 487.8cm tall by 167.6cm made of aluminum. Located at the entrance to the Audain Art Museum, it’s is a powerful piece inside a beautiful building.

I used a metre of RGB neopixels wrapped around a cardboard tube, diffused with the bubblewrap, and plugged into the Adafruit Magtag to animate rain. In this mode the lightbox will eventually fill to a full blue colour.

There are three other modes with different colours and animations using the Adafruit_led_animation library. Each mode animates differently and updates the e-ink display with a section of art from the lightbox.

Adafruit MagTag eink display
Top View: With e-ink the last image will remain, even after removing power.

I even upcycled the spool from the neopixel strip to mount the MagTag as it fit snuggly. There are plenty of other features I’ve yet to take advantage using built in Wi-fi, light sensor, etc.

Art by Coast Salish artist Xwalacktun
296 x 128 px Indexed Colour .BMP used to display on e-ink

The base is made with glued pieces of western red cedar to mimic the architecture of the museum and carved to receive the artwork.