Rise of the Machines
There's been a lot of hype recently about Mid Journey, so for a change, I actually began this mural by giving it a try - for my original concept art. On the Mid Journey Discord channels, you can see what others are submitting. Many of the request prefix with things like "hyper realistic...", or "manga style..." or "such and such style...", but one thing that struck me was how regardless of the style requested, it all looked very similar. If you were to take the Pepsi taste test for art, I believe that you could spot Mid Journey a mile off regardless of the style that it was peddling.
Personally, I think that as Mid Journey and it's inevitable offspring achieve ubiquity they will only serve to drive the commercial (and amateur) artist to extinction. Particularly the former as creation for us biological entities is a time consuming process. Perhaps the profit imperative will eventually even lead to the extinction of human creativity altogether. Curiously, once this happens, the AI will only have more and more self generated content to use in its learning algorithms. It seems to me, this will lead to a kind of post apocalyptic creativity wasteland. One where all music sounds the same, all art looks the same and all literature reads the same. And worse still, everyone accepts it.
Fun times ahead...
It all starts with an idea
Well, even given the above misgivings about the tool, I gave it a go for my concept preliminaries, primarily as a time saver actually, the brief for the mural was essentially: A robot owl and a city.
Once I had the Mid Journey homogeneousness, I set about a practice piece on board.
The Plan
I'd planned for 3 distinct layers to the painting:
- An under painting - to get painting on the Stark white wall as quickly as possibly.
- A detail layer - for tidying edges and padding out the intricacies; essentially the doodle layer!
- The popping layer - for adding additional highlights and shadows.
By Mark B
Mark has been drawing and painting since the late 1800s and has exhibited work in galleries and venues around the UK.