June Creative Juice Newsletter

Hello again!

With a return to teaching full time, I needed to decide what parts of illustration I can keep up with and what parts can perhaps take a back seat to make time for more important things. Over the past few months, the newsletter has been a thing I’ve been wanting to return to, but has been taking a backseat. However, with AI continuing to grow and with Meta launching their long awaited plans for their own AI plans, I think a more serious return to Substack makes sense. I don’t think anywhere is really safe to fully protect myself from AI art theft, but I do feel a little more comfortable with Substack and I think it’s a small step to having some control over social media. Again and again, I’ve experienced the drain that constant posting, constant interaction and just a constant inundation of information can cause. I’m hoping to make this space my main hub to share the most important information in a monthly update and launch a more slow conversation that can be returned to, that isn’t lost in a stream, that comes straight to your inbox. So, I hope you’ll subscribe, stay up to date and occasionally interact in a slow way with me here each month.

Glaze and Nightshade Initial Thoughts

With all of the AI chatter, I know a lot of artists are turning to Cara, but I think for now this is not something I want to invest too much time into until I see if it’s actually working, I’ve gone through enough faux departures from Instagram that I’m not sure I have the energy for yet another. But because the idea of a type of art community with some new faces does sound appealing and frankly because I am curious, I have at least put the tiniest hint of a toe into the water and created a username on Cara for now, but I don’t see it as a real replacement for Instagram, it might scratch some different itches. I will say, the feed without all the ads, videos, and just full on overstimulation has been a nice change of pace.

Until then, I’m working with Nightshade and Glaze to protect my images as best as I can. If you’ve not been part of the dialogue, essentially these programs mess up photos so that it is more difficult for them to be scraped and used in large AI databases. Both Nightshade and Glaze try to do this, but in different ways. My plan is to apply both in hopes of protecting things as best I can. I’d love to say I’ve done tons of research and know it all, but at the moment my main takeaways are the following:

• Glaze and Nightshade offer some protection.

• Glaze and Nightshade will probably need to be “reapplied” as AI gets better to offer continued protection.

• They can be used in tandem. The pieces of art included in this newsletter have had nightshade and glaze run on them. I did some with nightshade first and some with glaze first, just to see what would happen, but they seem about the same.

• They are not fullproof and don’t offer perfect protection.

• It can take a while to download. They are much larger packages than I expected.

• Applying the filters also takes much longer than I realized so prepare to let it run while you do other things. (My computer is also getting a bit older. :))

I have also come across the hack to open your art on your computer, take a photo with another device and then another photo of that and then post if your computer can’t run Nightshade or Glaze. This may be a path for me as well because it took me multiple days to run Nightshade and Glaze on the images for this post and to be frank, I just have other things to do that I can’t become some kind of AI avoidance guru. I just want to make art.

Little Dose of Inspiration

Back to more fun creative things, I started taking photos for an update in April offering some potential inspiration and never got a chance to share any of it, so I’ve compiled all of these photos into one monster inspirational collage. Most of it is colors pulled from nature, but there are some other images too that I really liked and wanted to include.

I’ve also created a palette based on the photo collage from above and I’m sharing an additional palette I enjoy using for my own pieces. Hopefully you can have some fun with these!

May Artwork Updates

I’ve been a little low on motivation so most of the artwork I created this month was for clients. I’ve had two little book projects going on in the background. For public facing work, I’ve been working on some #dtiys prompts. I created two pieces based on artwork by Tim Budgen and Becka Moor. I like to save these prompts that intrigue me to my favorites so that when I’m feeling a little tapped for ideas, I can flick these open and see if they spark any ideas.

In addition to these two #dtiys prompts, I worked on a few ideas from prompts that my agent sent my way. I’ve been working with a character playing with a homemade hobby horse type creation. It’s on its second iteration now, but I expect some continued tweaks since she’s been kind enough to help guide me through the pieces with some feedback at each stage. I think she’s still reading too old for what I am aiming for. I’ve been wanting to beef up my portfolio so I’m excited about this process and it’s been making me feel happier and more confident with my art again.

Non-Art Distractions

I’m slowly emerging from a creative lull. So, I’ve been taking as much time as I can for little enjoyments. Here are a few things I’ve been into lately.

• A return to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

• Carto (Switch)

• Slow Horses (Apple TV)

• Palm Royale (Apple TV)

• Bridgerton (Netflix)

• Real Dictators (Podcast)

• The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab (Book)

And on that note, goodbye for now. I wish you a month full of creative inspiration and I’ll meet you here again in July!