Using AI Art to Inspire Digital Drawing in Procreate

The recent explosion of websites that create artwork generated by Artificial Intelligence has opened up many new questions from artists about copyright related to AI artwork. One interesting idea that I saw demonstrated was from an artist who used AI pictures from Midjourney to inspire a painting that she created in Procreate. I decided to do my own experiment using some AI generated pictures to create my own painting of a fox. Above you can see the two AI images I used for inspiration (on the right) and my finished Procreate illustration (on the left).

I began by generating MANY pictures of a scene using the prompt "Painting of a fox in a winter night scene with mountains and pine trees." I used the website Stable Diffusion and an app called Dream. Both worked well, but I would not suggest Dream for students because it featured the work of various artists and some images might not be appropriate for school. I did like that Dream could let you pick artistic styles to try, and you could also upload a reference photo that it would use to help it generate the art.

https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo

https://apps.apple.com/in/app/dream-by-wombo-ai-art-tool/id1586366816

I saved some of the best images to my iPad photo album, then selected a few that had a good composition/arrangement of items to use for my painting. Since I usually can't generate an idea for a drawing from my head, I found that using AI to make a uniquely created image was a huge advantage to help me get started!

In the screenshot above from Procreate, you can see how I inserted my AI drawing into Layer 1. I traced it on Layer 2. I traced the reference image loosely, moved the moon to a different location, and added a tail to the fox. Underneath Layer 2, I added additional layers where I colored in the picture. Once my "painting" was done, I turned off layers 1 and 2.

I also used a second image as a reference photo in Procreate (above). I used this picture to select the colors for my digital painting. I also modeled my pine trees after the reference photo.

I think you can see how AI generated art can provide a copyright free image that can inspire drawings and paintings. Instead of tracing from a picture that is downloaded from the internet, you can create a work of art that is uniquely your own and created by you. It will be interesting to see if students and other artists can use AI art as a starting point to create their own works. I can imagine this might be a perfect way to help students get started who say "I don't know what to draw."

Call to Action: Do you have any ideas of projects in your classroom where students could use AI generated art for tracing?

One Best Thing:

This post is a part of my One Best Thing Project "AI Art for Inspiration, Creativity, and Learning." I am collecting my AI Art project ideas and resources at this website:

https://sites.google.com/view/creativeapptitude/ai-art