Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
I still hate AI…
AI art is all the rage these days, and it doesn’t seem like it’s fading into the background anytime soon.
Today, I want to share a bit about the artwork I craft for my Magic: The Gathering proxies.
Back when I began making proxies, AI art hadn’t hit the scene yet. My tools of choice were Procreate and Photoshop for the illustrations, followed by Illustrator for crafting all the symbols from scratch and picking fonts that were a far cry from anything Wizards of the Coast used.
Interestingly, the cards that flew off the shelves were those featuring my original artwork.
Here are some images of the cards that were purely my creation, no AI involved. These first four sets were a hit on Etsy, and I was pretty amazed by the demand.
Then along came Midjourney.
Suddenly, generating art was as simple as typing a prompt and letting the algorithm take over. Gradually, I found myself sketching less and diving deeper into Blender, which pretty much put a halt to my drawing. It’s a bittersweet feeling. Drawing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and now, with a few keywords, MidJourney can conjure up images that surpass anything I could manually create.
I created a series of cards using Midjourney, and even though they arguably looked better, they didn’t sell as well. It’s puzzling.
Lately, I haven’t been making many new cards, but I’ve been toying with the idea of getting back into drawing. Or perhaps blending Blender and traditional illustration. I’ve seen artists create scenes in 3D and then add hand-drawn elements on top. I’m not sure if that’s considered “cheating,” but it sounds like an intriguing experiment.
