Met an artist at a coffee shop who showed me her sketchbook after I mentioned using AI for art

I was in Portland last month and told a local painter I use Midjourney for concept work. She flipped through 40 pages of pencil sketches and asked me why I let a computer do the part that feels the best. Has anyone else had a real artist push back face to face like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

bailey.jennifer11d ago

Read an article in a design magazine about this exact thing. The artist they interviewed said if you skip the messy sketching part you are basically outsourcing your taste. I think about that a lot when I see people racing to generate final images without any rough drafts. That woman at the coffee shop probably sees her sketchbook as the real work and the final painting as just the end result. She is not wrong honestly. The process is where you learn what you actually like and dont like.

kai_burns7311d ago

And honestly the sketching thing also forces you to sit with bad ideas long enough to realize theyre bad. Like I had a friend who would do these super tight little thumbnails for book covers and half the time the one she thought was the worst ended up being the one the publisher picked. If she had just jumped to the final piece she wouldve never known. The ugly sketches reveal stuff your brain cant see when youre trying to make something look good from the start.