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. 

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. 

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. 

The Shipment

I have been continuing with the experimentation with Tiltbrush speedsculpting, using this as the means to jumpstart ideas that I can finish either in 2d or 3d. I leave the symmetry tool on, and then use the matte poly brush for the big shapes, than add more detail, timeboxed at about 15 to 20 minutes. 

The export process direct to Photoshop as a 3d object was not working too well for me, mainly because this gave me less control over the lighting of the object as I imagined the airship fitting into my scene. Modo was an easy input and ouput to just modify the lighting quickly, and then make a render along with a mask that Photoshop could use to isolate the ship. 

Photoshop does a great job for image filters, layer management, and masking, but personally, I find the painting tools through the brushes to be tool slow from moving my Wacom pen to seeing the resultant stroke, whereas SketchbookPro is much faster on the uptake, and has more 'painterly' brush kits.

In this case, I placed the SketchbookPro .tif file as a linked Smart Object within Photoshop, so that when I made changes to the greyscale SketchbookPro image, it updated automatically in my Photoshop file underneath the color adjustments and sepia filter. 

Overlay updates for Skillshare Photoshop class

Some of the feedback that I have received from my Photoshop class on the basics of opening and editing an image in Photoshop talked about my fairly Mac-centric shortcuts. It's true that I have been working mostly on the Mac for a long time, but that's really no reaosn to leave others out in the cold. I'll make the overlays in Photoshop and build out to Final Cut.