When I was a kid I’d spend hours doodling in notepads. To alleviate boredom during church or when my imagination went into hyperdrive after 10pm under a blanket fort, I’d create scenes of house cross-sections, tiny stick families within their prospective rooms, a forest with moving trees, roots connected and communicating (which I read about in a book years ago). I’d painstakingly craft a scene with construction crews building skyscrapers, their little cranes hoisting metal beams, dump trucks hauling rocks and supplies… though I had never seen construction like this in real life, I could create an accurate version because Incredible Cross Sections by Stephen Biesty was one of my favorite books, and my dad built residential homes for a living.
As I became a teenager, my interests began to favor theater, tennis, dating pretty girls, parties and playing hours of computer games… my creativity and time spent doodling slowly slipped away, fading to memories that my mom safely tucked away in storage.
Now at 37, I’ve realized that spending time mindfully—recreating those childhood creativity binges—is crucial to my mental health and daily fulfillment. These days finding myself lost for hours in “the flow” is a very rare phenomenon. If it can be reached at all, it’s usually quite brief, and replaced by long hours of work and responsibilities.
Because of this disconnect I’ve started devoting a certain amount of time per day to making. I call these creativity breaks “hour glass sessions” based on a tremendous hour glass timer that I purchased online. The actual dimensions of the timer turned out to be similar to a tall desk lamp, versus the size of a bottle of cologne as I had anticipated. When flipped over the sand doesn’t fully empty for an hour and a half. This is the perfect amount of time for making decent progress in a novel, starting a watercolor painting, reading a spread of tarot cards, doodling in Procreate, or as I’ve discovered, rendering AI art.
This last action feels slightly controversial as a practicing artist and designer, a lot of my friends and colleagues have very strong negative opinions on AI, and rightfully so! It’s a terrifying, awe-inspiring, life-changing set of tools that can in theory eliminate countless jobs. Conversely, it can inspire artists to create any visual image without supplies, budgets, or resources standing in the way of imagination.
I got a membership for Midjourney during one of the initial beta phases. When I rendered my first image, I was absolutely blown away by the detail in the scene I had described with a few sentences.
“A tomato vine in a sunbeam.
Crumbling bricks along an
English garden wall.”
The first image looked nearly photo-real. I made several different versions, moved onto a man in a cathedral with stained glass in the background, then a global village with black and white ceramics and onyx sand. Soon after, an ocean-side village with intricately designed terra-cotta pottery. I ran out of free renderings and instantly bought a membership to the site.
The thing that really struck me is that I get lost… the same feeling of pure creativity I had when I was a kid. I found “the flow” yet again, imagination running wild, thinking of how anything could be created, the only roadblock being how well I could write, what prompts were imagined, and of course how horrible earlier versions of Midjourney were at rendering fingers.
Today, we’re in a much more solid beta, the program knows how to create hands for the most part, and AI’s integration into our daily software and lives has expanded rapidly: Photoshop, Illustrator, Squarespace, even Spotify has AI features baked in. I saw an article talking about how people absolutely lost their shit when Xerox introduced the copy machine in 1970, how it would be the end of writers, how the creative world would go down in flames with this new form of techno-oppression!
I understand the initial hesitancy with AI. After all, having your industry change and embrace a new technology overnight is jarring. We don’t truly know what this software means for our jobs yet. However, after playing with it intimately for a few months, I feel confident that AI does have limitations and it’s a tool for creatives, not a replacement for us. Check out my renderings from Midjourney on Instagram.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below on all things AI and art.
