Resolene is an acrylic based leather finish that can protect smooth leather. I have a very large bottle of it. What else can I use it for? Will it work as a resist for watercolor art? It should, and it does!

I used a small paint brush to write “Happy Birthday” on two sheets of water color paper, then used a hair dryer to dry the writing.

My youngest and I then each painted watercolors over the entire paper. We wanted to try out some new pearlescent watercolors, so it was a double experiment (not recommended in scientific experiments, but encouraged in artistic endeavors.)

I think if I use Resolene to make words again, I will make the letters a little thicker, but overall the venture was a success! The clear acrylic kept the resisted areas mostly white, so the writing is readable in the final product. Pearlescent watercolors don’t photograph well for sparkle, but they do have a nice shimmer in person.

The subject of AI art has come up in my conversations and feeds several times this month, so I thought I would investigate further and give a few bots a prompt: line art, art nouveau, black and white, tattoo, silk moth, spider web, spider, flax flower, hemp leaf, cotton bloom. I’m working on a design incorporating fiber sources and wanted to see what the bots came up with.

Each time the prompt is given the results are slightly different for all the bots. Dream.ai, Deepai.org, and Craiyon.com were easier to use because it was a single page website interface. The Midjourney bot did the finest work, but was nestled in the Discord app and relied on a message board which was bombarded with prompts. I had to continuously scroll back to find my own prompts (and probably inadvertently used all my free queries getting the feel for the format). I wouldn’t use any of the images, they all have botanical accuracy issues, and wonky bits, but that could also be my choice of prompt words. They also feel like stock art. (Hm, there is something to ponder.) However, the exercise did give me examples of what I don’t want, and as an artist, sometimes that is valuable data. Starting with a blank canvas can be daunting.

Is it art? I think it is. The human is crafting with words and a bot, rather than paper and pen. The AI is learning and adapting according to prompts and feedback, but it is humans that give the image its story (for now). Will it surpass human art? In some cases, but not all. It is certainly faster. Will artists lose their jobs? Not the good ones, although it is extremely difficult to make a living wage on just art anyway. It is the story or the package, not just the image itself that gives value. Will humans stop making art? Are you kidding? Some people can’t stop, it is a driving force to doodle and create and refine, whether or not there is monetary gain. Will there be contention? Duh. We’re human.