Clowning Around

Yesterday I read that Meta scraped everyone’s images for their AI enshittification before they offered the opt-out, and the opt-out is only available to folk in the EU.

The opt-out doesn’t appear to work for me on Instagram, and given Scotland was dragged out of the EU against our will, I don’t know if it covers me anyway. I’m going to assume the worst, because let’s be real, this is Facebook. So any art and photography that I have uploaded there has fed their crappy, shitty machine, and I don’t have polite words for those fuckers.

I signed up for the Cara app, not least because it has partnered with Glaze, which enables artists to protect our work from AI. It doesn’t stop the scraping, but the glaze disrupts the machine and prevents it from using the image. I’ve read that it corrupts the data, and frankly, I’m all for that.

Of course the app is going through major growing pains with the recent influx of artists, and the Glaze function is currently disabled following an abuse incident, so I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m thinking I will simply uploading my art there first, running it through Glaze, then using those images everywhere else.

What a world, eh. The billionaires are so devoid of humanity they need to steal from artists and put artists out of work, rather than doing something useful with tech.

Ugh.

As futile as choosing to be an artist during the greatest enshittification of the interent so far is, I got painting early today. It was great. I just started. I wish every day was like this.

I started out in my sketchbook with another study of the reference I am using. Again with the shitty brush, because I am loving the looseness.

It was a nice warm-up, before going to the easel and starting on the canvas. You can see the remnants of the sketch I gessoed over underneath, and I quite like the fact it wasn’t hidden entirely.

Shitty brush again for the initial sketch and underpainting on the canvas, and enjoying the fact this is much more comfortable for me than it was just a few months ago.

I went in with the first pass, and I have really set myself a challenge. I’m going to use a large Bright brush for as much of the portrait as I can, it’s around ¾” wide. I’m also trying to stand back from the easel, for extra looseness.

All that while trying to recreate a clown face, with good use of value, which I think might be more of a challenge than just painting realistic skin tones. I’m having a lot of fun, though, which is really what this all should be about.

By the way, if you think I am to be wholly admired, full transparency is that I’m procrastinating about finishing a dog portrait I started some ridiculous time ago, possibly even a year, and it was my top priority this week. Ha.

Til the morn,

Suzanne

110/200

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