Where has Shawnna been? Hey. I am still here, learning cool new stuff, to make awesome new stuff with.
I have pivoted into a somewhat new direction, let me explain a bit about where I am going.
After I completed my God and Goddess painting series, I decided to go back and dive deeper into AI Art. You see, as an experiment, I used AI to formulate my composition idea to create that painting. At the time I had this song stuck in my head for weeks, as well as this story idea about an eternal love between a God and Goddess. The feeling of this song matched my story idea, and I wanted to bring that feeling to life somehow. The song is called “1 am” by the band Engine, I will link it at the end of this post. So as an experiment, I learned how to communicate with AI by writing properly written prompts to tell my stories to AI to create these ideas out of thin air for me. To my sheer delight, it worked like a charm as it conveyed the feeling so well that I wanted to capture. Next was to take that image it came up with and create my painting composition from it. The results of which was my God and Goddess painting series, which I also published in videos on my Instagram page.
That was such a fun and inspiring project for me, and I learned so much in the process of it. But once it was done, I crashed and burned into a deep depression again. This is a roller coaster cycle that I have been on since 2021 when my husband John passed away and I entered the mind f*ck world of being a “Widow”. I have not talked about this much publicly, but my struggles with my grief and depression have been very harsh. My Mom and friends have helped me a great deal to get through it, one day at a time. Maybe one day in the future I will write about my experience. But for now, I just need to move forward as best as I can without dwelling too much on the bullshit that happened that I had zero control over. So, I pulled myself out of the crash cycle again by deep diving my learning of AI Art with Midjourney.
Here is a little back story. Most of you reading this don’t know that I spent 25 years in a Tech career as a Software Quality Assurance Analyst testing various Software and Internet Applications and Websites both Desktop and Mobile on many platforms. So, I am used to dealing with technical IT things. But I also grew up around the Art world as my mom, Pam Tanzey, is a very talented Artist who has had a fascinating career of her own. So, when I jumped into the deep end of the AI Art world, I quickly realized that it is actually a perfect match for me and my background.
Also to back it up a bit further before my QA career, back when I was in high school in the 80s, my mom was jamming in her Art Illustration career and had a ton of coloring book projects she was doing for different publishing houses. I ended up helping her with those projects. She would draw the illustrations out onto tissue paper, then I would transfer each of her sketches by drawing over her original lines through carbon paper onto nice thick paper. Then she would come back through and ink the transferred sketches that I did. I totally loved helping her with this work, it was super fun. Here is a photo below of my favorite project we did together back then called “Lady Lovely Locks and The PixieTails” published by A Golden Book Western Publishing Company in 1986.
And now, I have come full circle back 30+ years and created my own coloring books with my own ideas that I told as stories in written prompt form to Midjourney, which so beautifully rendered my ideas into reality. Completely thrilling and exhilarating, and now I have the ability to bring my ideas out of the ether and into reality in a very fast and seamless way.
I have noticed a lot of conflicting feelings being expressed by Artists about AI. They have valid concerns on the AI learning/training process and how Artists are not being considered or compensated properly. But AI is only going to improve, grow and evolve as a tool that Artists should be involved with. To me, this all feels very similar to when Photoshop first became popular. Back then there were a lot of concerns from Artists that they would be replaced and look how that turned out. Photoshop, and other software like it (like my favorite Affinity products suite) are invaluable tools to bring our visions to life. That is how I feel about AI Art, it will evolve into also being invaluable as tools to bring our wildest conceptualizations into reality in ways we never imagined before. Honestly, it feels quite limitless.
So, I have pivoted in what I am doing, but I am not abandoning painting. I want to expand by blending my art with complex composition ideas created in AI to then actually paint them, and maybe show others how to do what I have figured out how to do. There are many steps to this stuff, which can be easily overwhelming.
One of my other passions is taking beautiful antique art and bringing it into a modern format for modern artists and makers to use to make new art from (you can find my collections in my Creative Fabrica and Etsy Shops). Thus, saving these wonderful almost forgotten works of art made over 100 years ago. My favorite antique art is the Art Nouveau period. I just love the nature inspired intricate flowing lines of that style and find it very inspiring. So that was the first thing that I played with when I was learning Midjourney. This is how my first 2 Art Nouveau style books were born called “Art Nouveau Fashion Ladies Coloring Book”.
Then I had the idea to experiment and mix up Art Nouveau style with 1970s Hippy stuff. The results were exactly as I imagined, and that is how my next 2 books were born called “Art Nouveau Seventies Fashion”.
I am having so much fun creating these books, and they came together so perfectly. I have endless ideas for coloring books and other product ideas such as Junk Journals and other Printables that I want to do too.
I hope that you check out my newest book releases that I conjured out of the ether and my mind using the Midjourney AI Art Web App, and lots of other software.
More to come! Thanks for stopping by!
Reference Links:
Shawnna’s Amazon Author Shop Page
Shawnna's Designs 