Challenge

 

Now that I've started showing my pictures of library workers with their spirit animals here, my impulse is to show the ones that I'm struggling with instead of clean versions of my finished ones. Maybe that explains what I'm presenting here as more in the line of process. This record here is not the outcome of this project, but more the account of what I'm working on and what I'm learning along the way.

With this understanding it seems natural then to show you the first of Scott's pictures while still not entirely sure where all of his will end up. Scott works in building management at the library and talking about spirit animals with him brought up the Japanese animator Miyazaki. 

Invited along to it Scott wanted a Miyazaki-like Japanese Mythic Spirit as his spirit animal.

This seemed like a fun challenge to me at the time, and after a couple of hours working on it, it still does.

After numerous wrong turns I have one image I may or may not be finished with to show you.

When I use these generative tools sometimes I can say "cheetah", and there's a pretty good cheetah. But always at this point there is a lot of patching in, drawing a little area and suggesting "fur" or "finger" or "long wool sleeve, black" or whatever, and then hoping it works out to solve a problem and not create too many more.

These suggestions are called prompts.

This first picture of Scott's Japanese Steam Spirit is almost like painting with prompts.