Success AI Stories of Szkandal, Ren Gonzaga & Petra.
A Weekly AI Collective meets talented artists of the AI Renaissance. Ep 5, 2022.
Barcelona, Spain — November 21, 2022 — In the fifth episode of the Twitter Spaces by A Weekly AI Collective we are introducing the Success Stories of Petra, Szkandal and Ren Gonzaga, promising AI artists.
A Weekly AI Collective was founded in collaboration with Exquisite Workers to educate the community about the AI Art Movement, feature creators who are building it, and share our fascination about the NFT / blockchain technology and its potential for expression, collaboration, and monetization of the digital art. A Weekly AI Collective chooses Twitter Spaces as it is a simple way to organize free live audio talks on Twitter by using your phone.
PETRA
Petra is an AI artist based in Bali, Indonesia. She showed a strong interest in art from an early childhood following in the footsteps of her father, an artist and designer. Petra studied at art school as a child and in 2019 she gained her Degree in Culture and Arts and binded her life with art. In July, 2022 she experienced AI’s possibilities and minted her first NFT. With the help of AI, Petra explores and translates emotions, mood and circumstances. All Petra’s art can be described as attempts to avoid conventional vision in favor of broadcasting rare states captured by observing sight. Living on an Island of Gods, she finds endless inspiration in every casual moment: from nature, people and of course, love.
Petra´s work is available on Objkt and Foundation.
Links of the artist — https://objkt.com/profile/petra/created, https://foundation.app/@petravoice
REN GONZAGA
Ren Gonzaga is an Italian traditional painter and AI whisperer. After many years of painting on commission, he embraced AI to help him cut ties with the classic style and explore new ways of expression. He merges the old masters’ art with the modern aesthetics guided by his taste using instinctive brush strokes, layered lights and hidden meanings. The scenes are taken from everyday life, but they convey the deepest feelings of the people depicted. The viewer can take in the craft and the message to bring home a reaction that will make them think for a long time. Ren depicts himself a someone who has a free spirit and who likes things that take time, passion and craft to build.
His work can be collected on Objkt, OpenSea, KnownOrigin, & Foundation.
Website of the artist — https://linktr.ee/renai_nft
SZKANDAL
Szkandal is a 28 year old visual artist born in Ukraine and who has lived in Poznań, Poland since 2012. He started out as a self-taught traditional artist, the AI came into Szkandal ´s life in 2022. In his work, Szkandal searches to represent the themes of chaos, disorder, people’s dualism and finds inspiration in the comic books, such as of Druillet, Moebius and Spiegelman. Passionate about robots, mechas, gundams, monsters and creatures, he likes to create fictional worlds and stories, often with an open ending. As for hobbies he’s into tattooing, making handmade stickers or posters for the streets or local coffee shops, collecting vinyl and visiting art sales.
Szkandal ´s work can be collected on Objkt and Foundation.
Links of the artist — https://objkt.com/profile/szkandal/collections https://foundation.app/@szkandal
The questions that we asked the guest artists are:
- Tell us a little more about yourself and how you discovered AI. When did this happen and how have you used AI, including the tools and your sources of inspiration.
- What was the first AI artwork you have ever minted, and what is your most favorite AI artwork so far, and why?
- What is your secret to community building (your relation with fellow AI creators and collectors)?
- What is the most challenging and most liberating part of using AI from your perspective? What would you recommend to those who are about to start their journey as AI artists in the border of 2022 and 2023?
Petra´s quotes:
“The improvement of prompts comes with the practice”.
“I use Midjourney in most of my works. Every time I want to stop my subscription, they deploy a new game-changing upgrade, so I continue using it. At this moment, I also use Stable Diffusion for outpainting and sometimes Procreate for fixing or polishing some details.”
“The inspiration comes to me in the process of prompting. I start with something, it can be anything, and then when I see some nice outputs I try to develop and experiment more until I am happy with the result.”
“I did not mint any image which I would not describe as my favorite.”
“I really enjoy how Midjourney can now cope with photorealistic tasks and make possible a variety of outputs such as faces, poses, and emotions the characters can translate. My secret in prompting is not only to use the artists references but also movie directors. This is probably a perfect way to achieve some particular vibe. Also it is very important for me to use different words describing emotions.
“I am a part of 6 group chats around AI topic including MAIF and Tez_Girls (the last one I created with a group of girls artists to connect with other girls from NFT communities around the world).”
“To start out it is very good to participate in events such as making an open edition of NFTs with a lower price to grow your audience.”
Ren Gonzaga´s quotes:
“I started out doing traditional art on commission but really wanted to create my own art.”
“I first worked at Disco Diffusion recreating my traditional pieces. In AI I found the assistant for my work. Many traditional artists had an assitant, so do I. I express my ideas, my intent and what I like (it can be music, movies, my daily experiences). My biggest challenge is the composition in AI which does not have a sense of it yet. I almost got to the point that I can control it.”
“I am learning to set on one thing in my production given the abundance of options in AI art.”
“Now I mostly work with the Stable Diffusion which allows me to outpaint and inpaint and do other incredible stuff which generally takes multiple tools to do.”
“The most liberating part is not needing to wait for the right time of the day to get the light right on the canvas or wait the oil to dry up.”
“My tips to the newcommers would be to not expect anything. Only those who work hard, study and stay around, will succeed on the long run.”
“In “Six Feet Above” piece the old man is taking his time to enjoy himself in the big city. And the inspiration came when I was chatting with another artist in space Francien Krieg.”
Szkandal´s quotes:
“Someone in space gave me 0.3 Tezos to mint my first work. After one year of being in the NFT space, I got the invitation on Midjourney Discord. As the first prompt I introduced the descriptions of my previous digital artworks to try things out and see where it takes me.”
“One of the things that I draw inspiration from is music. One of my favourite bands is Boards of Canada. I like imagining things listening to it. I am also inspired by other artists´ art because I want to be as good as them. I am also very much inspired by other artists´ AI art.”
“The most challenging is to make a pause and also to keep track of the prompts without loosing good results. I advise the newcomers to set a group chat for yourself on any app available in your country (e.g. Trello, Notion, Telegram et.) in which you can send yourself and keep all prompts and interesting vocabulary that you like.
“Stable Diffusion suggests some lists of datasets that are ‘visible and knowable’ by Stable Diffusion models. And we can also suggest new (unknown to SD) artists for the databases to keep growing.”
“I remember my first days and my first prompts. I advice you to keep trying and adding new prompts whenever people are buying your art or not.”
“My favorite piece is the one I submited to 2nd edition of Claire Silver AI Contest “worms”. I made it very fast, in two hours. It resonates with me and reminds strong life moments . Apart of sentimental load, it looks really cool.”
Listen to the Twitter Spaces via this link. The duration is 1:28 min. Language: English (please turn on the captions if needed).
Want to tune in to the upcoming A Weekly AI Collective Twitter Spaces?
It is easy! Next Monday we are having the casual chat about AI and things happening in space. See you then!
Would like to try the AI tools and do not know where to start?
No problem! We invite you to explore the AI tool Box by Time Traveller AI, AWAIC communite memeber. It is a great thread on Twitter which covers the major AI tools such as DALL-E 2, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion (with prompts and examples of outcomes). 🔥
You are also welcome to discover our previous articles.
If you have any questions or if you want to work with us, feel free to contact us. For business inquiries or very personal reasons, you can send us an email via hello[at]exquisiteworkers.com (Replace [at] with @, this tactic is to avoid spam). We are always available and happy to help artists and AI art collectors like you!
