As the year draws to a close, I've been thinking back on the things I've been using in my craft. I figured folks might like to join me, and it could spark some interesting discussions about different kinds of artistic tools.

• What have been your go-to art/craft supplies this year?
• What have you tried for the very first time?
• Have you returned to using something you haven't touched in a long while?
• Have you been pleasantly surprised by something?
• Has something disappointed you?
• Was there something you dreamed about making art with, but couldn't get for some reason?

I hope this is the right section for this. I recently discovered Easy Diffusion so I've moved to running SD locally on my own PC, but I'm having some issues getting the most out of it. It's hard to find good articles online that describe in plain, simple text how to do much of anything; most of them boil down to "To do this, just do it" which is frankly beyond useless. I'm trying to find good, concise help for the following few things:

-A good refresher or explainer on how the features work. I've gotten to where I am by simply looking at other prompts by people and making my own by cobbling them together. It works, but I know it could work better if I actually understood what I was doing.

-A simple how-to for training your own models/LoRAs. Every article I've looked at was written for the benefit of machines, it seems like. They tend to either be the same "to do it, just do it" pieces or stuff written for those who clearly already know what they're doing.

Basically I've been using AI to generate commission references I can give to a proper artist later. It's hard to commission work of characters who haven't been drawn before, and I've had poor experiences in the past with submitting written descriptions. Either there's a language barrier or it leads to a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth with the artist making them tweak or redo things which is not fair to them. If I can just show a few picture references I've made, it ensures I get what I'm looking for and the artist has an easier time.

I've seen that @skyrbrian seems to be the subject matter expert, but thanks in advance to anyone who replies!

I've never really been much of an artist myself, but one of my kids (11m) really likes drawing, painting and making small animations on his ipad. I'd like to give him some gentle encouragement, if that's likely to help him enjoy creating artwork more, but I'm not sure what would be a good approach. Does anyone have some suggestions? He told me that he likes drawing objects and landscapes, but I think that's only because he's not confident in drawing live subjects.

Some ideas I had, but I'm not certain of:

• Sketchpad?
• Guide or drawing techniques book?
• Finding and recommending a good youtube channel?

If there's something that helped you at this time of life please let me know, thank you!

If i have a lot of acrylic on canvas paintings and I want to produce prints to sell, where do you make the prints? Local Kinko's/staples?
Clear plastic bag or no? Brief artist blurb at the back? Post card?

Have you ever bought a print? What made you want to buy it or what stopped you, and what would have made it go from no to yes?

AI is the best and worst thing that's happened, apparently. It's also pretty hilarious. With the right sentence fed to it, there can be some really unique images created.

This post is to challenge people to get AI Artsy with the whackiest thing they can think of to ask AI to generate. I'm simply using Bing Chat which uses DALL-E to create. All you need to do is post the sentence you used to generate and a link to the image, like this:

A goldfish riding a jet ski under a bridge doing an epic jump from a wave

If you need a different free AI Art generator, have a look at https://www.craiyon.com/. If you want to add why you came up with the image, go for it. My mind just works in mysterious ways so I have no idea why I asked this. Probably the same reason I asked it to generate a hotdog paragliding over the Alps...

Enjoy the silliness and fun, with a hint of AI art at the same time.

Back in the day https://ffffound.com/ was one of my biggest inspirations for imagery and creative ephemera.

I miss it sometimes and have a vast archive of downloaded inspiration. I discovered a lot of material under the radar of pop culture.

Kind of like picking up a circa 2009 vice magazine from a shop. I was seeing and feeling things that felt textural and well curated.

Is there something around that I haven’t seen?

Where do you share the art that you make with the world? Do you use a social media site? A personal website? Do you keep it all to yourself? Is your art something that can't be shared online so easily?

I will be participating in a panel discussion about the intersection of art and Artificial intelligence next week, and I am curious how fellow creatives feel about Artificial intelligence.

Have you used AI before in the creative process? If so, what services have you used/prefer?

What do you think the role of AI is in the creative process?

Does AI enhance creativity or limit originality?

What are the ethical implications of using AI to create art?

For those that don't know, Art Fight is a collaborative creative project that sorts artists into two teams and lets them upload their original characters. In order to score points for your team, you have to draw the other team's characters, with more involved and polished artworks scoring higher points. I'm participating for the fourth time this year, and if you're going to as well, feel free to drop your art fight URLs in the comments so we can follow and "attack" one another!

I have a gift idea for my husband that involves commissioning some specific custom artwork (Pokémon-themed, in case that matters!). I did some cursory searches and turned up results on Etsy and Fiverr, but some of these look like they’re automated and are suspiciously inexpensive. Other offers on those sites look more promising, but I’m not even sure if Etsy/Fiverr are where I should even look in the first place.

I’m happy to pay an artist for their work and want this to be something of quality. I’m also fine with waiting on it — some of the stuff I’ve found so far looks tailored for speed.

What’s the best place I should look with quality artists who I can pay fairly for their work?

Hi folks. I'm posting this in ~creative because I want to see what other artists think of it; the technical side is important too, but artists and art are the focus of this project.

Cryptographic Digital Art Tokens are a concept I've been working on for a while, to provide some of the benefits of crypto tokens without perpetuating the harm they create.

CDATs are not NFTs. They are not designed to facilitate investment, but rather collection. They do not use a blockchain and do not rely on distributed consensus at all. Instead, they use traditional cryptography to validate the ownership of art.

How CDATs Work

Let's say an artist Adam creates a piece of art called One. He decides he wants to sell a CDAT of One, so he creates a CDAT key and publishes his public key on his website, adam.art.

A collector, Beth, decides she wants to buy One. She e-mails Adam and they agree on a price, and exchange keys; once she has paid, Adam sends Beth a CDAT, which he has signed. Beth then cross-signs the CDAT and sends it back to Adam. It ends up looking like this:

=== CDAT DATA ===
Artist: Adam <adam@adam.art>
Collector: Beth <beth@betawork.codes>
Date of Sale: 2021-12-08T19:50:56Z
Title: One, a Digital Story
Work ID: art.adam.one
Cover Hash: e82c294938320bf4fab56970f52e1ddf
Work Hash: 3179c999f1d4fab4bcc8a57bca1c9d8c
Artist Key Fingerprint: c634d0420f825b91
Collector Key Fingerprint: 3b2e3bbf91ec96c2
=== CDAT SIGN ===
Artist Signature: YTtsc2tkamY7bHNramY7bGtqZDtsa2pmYTtsZGt...
Collector Signature: cXdpZXVwcXdpeXR1djtsbmFvdWNuZWN2cHdl...
=== CDAT META ===
Cover URL: https://adam.art/images/one-cover.jpg
Work URL: https://adam.art/art/one.zip
Artist Key URL: https://adam.art/static/cdat.key
Collector Key URL: https://betawork.codes/
=== CDAT OVER ===

In an ideal world, with all the software enablement I want to do, Beth would be able to take this token and put it in a digital gallery or on her website, where the art piece, and her ownership of it, would be proudly displayed for all to see in a user-friendly, beautiful format.

Structure

The CDAT has three sections - DATA, which is signed, META, which is not, and SIGN, which contains the CDAT's cryptographic signatures. Hashes and key fingerprints are in the DATA section, but URLs are in the META section, which means they can be changed later; artists and collectors can re-host their art and keys, so long as the files' hashes or fingerprints remain exactly the same.

Semantics

Because the CDAT is cross-signed, anyone can see that both Adam and Beth have agreed to the sale. Assuming the signatures and keys all check out, Beth can now prove to people that Adam sold her his art, and Adam can prove that Beth bought it.

Implementation

In order for this interaction to work, we technically need only existing technology: you can validate such things with GPG and some manual reordering. Ideally, though, we'd have a few tools:

• A CDAT validation program. This should include a command line program and a GUI (maybe even a mobile app?), and would validate the following information:
  • The given signatures are valid and correct for the given CDAT.
  • The keys used to sign the CDAT match both the given fingerprints and identities.
  • The linked key URLs, if any, in fact point to the indicated keys.
  • The linked art and cover URLs, if any, in fact point to files with the given hashes.
• A CDAT creation program. This should include a command line program and a GUI. It would take as input the relevant keys and names, provide a way to set the date, and ensure that everything relevant is online at the given URLs.
  • This program would be used by both artists (to create CDATs) and collectors (to cross-sign CDATs).
• A CDAT hosting service. Obviously there could be more than one of these, and people could host their CDATs and art on their own machines - that's decentralization, baby! - but it would be very nice to be able to host CDATs, art, and keys for free or a nominal fee.

This would be a great start, but in order to really kick-start the ecosystem, it would be nice to provide some additional enablement software, such as:

• A drop-in HTML embed that uses client-side JavaScript to display and validate CDATs on a website.
• A browser extension which validates CDATs found on arbitrary websites, on the user's request.
• A self-hostable CDAT gallery for artists and collectors which displays who owns what, and which art pieces are still for sale.

Please let me know if this idea is interesting to you, and ask any questions/leave comments!

Howdy folks.

Had a recent interest in large-scale art projects, and I'm not sure where to start looking to find more.

Anything that by nature has to exist outside of a museum. I'm looking for big displays. Whether it be large scale performance art, buildings erected at the will of an artist, or things like the Dumb Starbucks event that took place out in Los Angeles.

Installments that took any measure of great coordination, investment, or raw personal effort.

I feel like I'm doing a right shit job of describing this - but maybe you get the idea. If anyone has links to news articles, blog posts, or whatever about these kinds of art please drop a comment!

So once a year artists all over the internet settle down and attempt Inktober, where we abandon our digital tools and attempt to put out paper-and-ink drawings once a day for the full month of October! There's "official" prompt sheets and the like, but a lot of us focus on just getting the art made rather than going by a list of ideas to draw.

I never make it the full month, but we're three days in now and I'm currently 3 for 3!

Anyone else taking part? I'd love to see what you've made!

In honor of starving artists everywhere, the topic for this thread is "scant".

• Feel free to open it up to interpretation as literal or loose as you'd like
• Whatever medium works best for you! Even though I labelled the thread as "visual", it would be great to see work from any writers or musicians if any would like to participate as well.
• Entry should be your own work
• Multiple entries are great if you feel inclined

@userexec won the last round of the Visual Weekly Activity. I don't want to steal the glory, but I also got ants in my pants. So this is an unofficial thread and hopefully userexec will chime in with a new official thread when they have time.

Edit: moved the user tag down so the main topic is more visible.