In early 2022, I did a series of fantasy pinups. My Patreon and Twitter followers voted on which characters from any given week would show up in future weeks. Little narratives started to unfold each time a character was featured; we eventually ended up with overarching narratives and characters whose stories overlapped. When I sat down to figure out what kinds of comics I wanted to make this year, fleshing those stories was as good of a place to start as any.

Images released under CC0. Workflow includes a combination of manually rendered content and assets generated by Stable Diffusion.

Shit looks like AI art, nah man.

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The workflow includes AI. For this chapter, I hand drew the characters and had the AI do several passes over them for the final renders, and then did manual touch-ups. When I was making chapter 1, the adult content AI models genuinely sucked- the AI didn't know what a dick was, much less what penetrative sex was- so there was a lot of manual illustration and manual touch-ups.

I've been a full-time freelance illustrator since about 2015. AI represents the death- or drastic change- of my old way of life. Not saying I was terribly good, but I was good enough and reliable enough to squeeze by. In 2022, most of my freelance work was character illustrations and portraits, though... the stuff that AI knocks out of the park without even trying.

AI might be the grave of my career, but, well... look for what joy in life that you can. Find the things that bring you satisfaction and relish them. If you are presented with your own grave, might as well take the opportunity to dance on top of it ❤️

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@sketchquest AI generation is a tool just like Photoshop is a tool. You use that tool instead of beaing its slave. Good job.

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Put the fact that this is AI generated in your title, so it gets the tag and people's filters work...

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