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[michaelplzno]

If you just want easy to digest stuff based on what everyone else is doing then the AI can generate that:

I would say my birds are more interesting, but maybe you like the ai more?

[J-Snake]

Always room for improvement, but definitely better. The easier to digest, the better, but harder on your end. If the goal of art is to spark inspiration, then your bird picture is objectively weaker, as it’s harder to digest.

[michaelplzno]

I'm not opposed to doing work, as someone who has drawn thousands of sketches I think I can prove that.





If you polish down the gemstone to nothing you are making a boring set of work. Better to have some rough edges imo. I know that obsessive polish and overwork may be the key to mass appeal... that is, to make something very bland and safe.

I don't really agree that the AI's safer, tamer, suit and tie, corporate stock art is better than my wild and free home grown stuff. But as the postmodernists would say, there is no objectivity, there is no truth, despite your claim, so we can't know which piece is better... right? The spiritual man will say that my version of the kiss has the spark of the divine? Or can we not really argue that because it is all an arbitrary assumption?

[J-Snake]

This really boils down to a fundamental question: What are you trying to achieve with your art? Have you thought about an answer to that?

[michaelplzno]

Joke answer:

Real answer:

I'll have to consider it more carefully, obviously making some money in there would be nice, but somehow it seems like you must be on a tight leash to make any money, even though my art is pretty tame already.

[J-Snake]

That wasn’t quite what I meant. Put money-making aside. What impact do you want your art to have on its observer? What are you trying to express?

[michaelplzno]

There are a lot of categories of things I want from my art.

Some of them are selfish, like wanting to make money, or wanting to reach a group of like minded friends who can brainstorm together and hang out even, or even just selfishly wanting to have fun to make the stuff rather than suffer through some hell to turn out work.

Some of the things I want actually are service to the audience. Yes, I would like to inspire, as always, it would be great if people saw my art and decided that they too want to spend a coffee break or two making something creative.

But, also, I want the viewer to have a sense of fun and playfulness, which may have to do with the framing of the art. For example, if art is shown to you as some great masterwork, it might not be so fun to view. Or in a museum, where everyone is shushed and almost in reverence of the art, that is boring. You can't even bring a cup of coffee into a museum.

There is a story about Maurice Sendak, the author of "Where the Wild Things Are," about how a kid's mom sent Maurice a letter about how his son loved his art, so Maurice sent a hand drawn image in response. The kid's mom said he loved it so much he ate it.

I chose Maurice Sendak because I want to appeal to the wild things of the world, hence my wild art. But also, I don't want there to be a gaping gulf between the world and me. Miyazaki has a profound loneliness to his art, that he makes such meticulous drawings that every little detail is so deep and impactful that he comes across as some kind of lone genius:

I'd like to build bridges, build community, find a place for the weirdos who might not fit in elsewhere. Heal and help souls that don't feel seen. I would love to inspire good conversation with my art, it seems like all anyone has to say about art is some kind of bull* sales pitch stuff about "transformative impact" and "emotional depth" people don't talk about art in a good way anymore, that it is all tactics (oh my guy should win the curatorial process so I'm going to give a stump speech about how great this art is.) and not so much people saying what they feel about art.

I also don't want to make cheap emotional tripe: just making someone feel something is not really my goal, I also want to make people think, have ideas, and find meaning, rather than just oh I feel something but have no internal thoughts or machinations.

I don't know I'll think about it.

Edit, tried to make the art a bit more desaturated and stormier to fit with the whole gestalt of the thing.

[michaelplzno]

The Beatles are great in terms of the impact of the feeling of their art. They got hosed on their contract but the emotional, *and* the logic/structure of their work is unbeatable.

[ProgramGamer]

Damn, I don't think I could recover from being told my art is objectively weaker than AI generated stuff. Brutal.

[michaelplzno]

I have chosen the path of perpetual torment: (maybe a mistake in hindsight.)

[J-Snake]

Damn, I don't think I could recover from being told my art is objectively weaker than AI generated stuff. Brutal.

The AI was trained on a lot of human input, so you shouldn't take it that way.

@Michael: I can see that emotional depth is not your inclination, which limits the range of emotions drastically. So in your case, you are still left with 'fun, playful, and wild' themes. This is still valuable, but these moods also require effort to convey fully. I also see how the 'wild' element brings a certain roughness to your drawings that might not resonate with everyone. Personally, I enjoy the cheerful style of Disney or Yoshi’s Island, and I liked some of your joyful-looking clouds:)

[michaelplzno]

I mean, if I could make people laugh that is the most difficult and rewarding art there is... I'm intimidated to try it.

(Never wins awards, lol.)

[michaelplzno]

I trained an AI model based on 83 images of my own and then plugged in your prompt into the AI:

Any of these seem up to par?

[J-Snake]

Achieving a high level of emotional depth and that kind of beauty requires a certain maturity. It’s simply not your focus, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m not undervaluing your playful style. Instead, I think it’s best to embrace what you truly enjoy and keep refining it.

[michaelplzno]

I'm not devaluing the third dimension, if it is some kind of emotional thing, or whatever it may be. I can't really know it. All I know is that in my real life, it seems like some unwanted other-worldly force tugs on my measuring stick and adds glitches and other bullshit to a life that otherwise makes sense. These moments are not moments of joy, more like frustration and misery would be the emotion I tie to it, dread, a feeling of un-reality, that the world is just an illusion.

I'm not interested in breaking beyond the measuring stick because it seems like it is the only thing protecting me from some world where spurious and weird emotions tear me into little shreds.

It does seem like once you make it to the next dimension, most people stop making much art, which is a red flag for me. A lot of the enlightended people whom one would suspect are "3d agents" don't do much creative work. They are managers on bigger projects. Or I don't even know what they do with their time, they don't post anything. These so called "Masters of Art" don't seem particularly prolific... but maybe the few pieces they make over an 80 year life are somehow much deeper? Full of hard fought emotions, you have just one picture of a sad clown with a flower that you keep working on for a lifetime.

To me, to be stuck on 1 project for 80 years would be hell.





I hope the would be "enlighteners" will understand that I don't consent to go into another dimension where I eat gruel and follow orders and just generally my life stinks, so I may hit them with the ruler to try to keep my little "Beaulieu sur Mer" alive. Is that so wrong?

[nathy after dark]

Really, you can say Miyazaki's art is beautiful and emotionally deep, but I would say that his stuff is the boring art:

This art is so overworked and polished that it is a boring kid's movie. And kids love art that is totally on rails and completely safe and polished, but does that make it good art?

I chose Maurice Sendak because I want to appeal to the wild things of the world, hence my wild art. But also, I don't want there to be a gaping gulf between the world and me. Miyazaki has a profound loneliness to his art, that he makes such meticulous drawings that every little detail is so deep and impactful that he comes across as some kind of lone genius:

The contradiction really stood out to me here. In one post, you're calling Miyazaki boring. A few posts later, you're saying his work is deep and impactful and genius. I see so much oscillation between wild extremes in the way you're thinking about art. Truly I get the sense that you're in a deep dark emotional place (understandable!), and it could be really helpful to look for some kind of support group in real life to talk about these things (because it sounds like financially, you might not have access to therapy).

If that sounds uncaring... I don't mean it that way. I'm not gonna spare the time right now to try to soften it. It's just genuine advice. Sorry about that--and sorry for giving it unsolicited.

It certainly can't be helping you find the community you crave, to be showing up in such an emotionally disturbed state.

The Maurice Sendak anecdote is amazing. I like to tell people that story, too, because it's inspiring and funny as hell. Here's the thing--Maurice Sendak's illustrations, while you might be thinking are "wild" and "unconventional", are actually incredibly polished and refined. That style of being wild, upbeat, and weird, not too depressing--is still a STYLE that must be EXPERTLY EXECUTED. And also, kids (and all audiences) are so weird! When a children's author becomes a phenomenon, there is an aspect of cosmic luckiness in it. But my big point here would be, has a kid ever eaten one of your drawings? If not, you can't just keep calling your art wild and weird and beautiful. If you're looking for sales and recognition and love, TRULY those things can only come from other people. You have to listen, and study others, and keep showing people your work until they say it is wild and beautiful.

Right now I'm also at a low point in my indie career. My long-time project just isn't selling. Like you mentioned you're trying to do, I had to get a job. I see where you're coming from. The landscape is very bleak, and you're not wrong that there are elites and power structures and injustice swirling around stifling the growth of new unusual art. That just doesn't mean you can ignore the audience reaction and keep yelling at a cloud.

There's an example of a long-time successful indie developer who actually is frequently writing advice to uplift new indies and try to give back to the community. Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software. Every time he talks about game development, the #1 thing he stresses is that this business is lethally difficult to be in. Statistically speaking, no one* is making a living developing indie games. Those who are are outliers, the chance to become one of them is so vanishingly thin from a numerical standpoint, we have to come at this with a perspective of, we need to get our money somewhere else.

EDIT: One last thing. As a person who is making dark, edgy, sad art. I can tell you very confidently that people aren't doing this in some kind of grand conspiracy to make the world sadder or suppress defiance and individuality. We're making sad art because it's part of our true authentic emotional experience.

EDIT 2: * This is true at least for solo developers. It might not be true for indies who are willing to compromise their own vision a little bit to join a smaller studio that is still independent, and they accept that they will be working on games that aren't solely their vision.

[michaelplzno]

Thanks for the detailed reply Nathy:

The contradiction:

A court case over the custody of a child is deep and impactful... and probably boring too... no? Deep does not imply quality; just playing the heavy keys doesn't make your stuff grand or even interesting. There is a lot of tripe that aspires to depth without much substance.

Miyazaki did capture my imagination in my teens, and I even wrote about Whisper of the Heart as one of my art school application essays, the scene where the protagonist shows a shopkeeper her first story and he compares it to an uncut gem that might be ruined if you try to polish it too much.

Sadly, I've fallen out of love with the guy as he seems, the more I read about him and his acolytes, to be a dreadfully unpleasant man.

Polish...

Yes, there is a great deal of craft to Maurice Sendak's art, and it is expertly executed. Truly, to be an artist, you must be a master craftsperson to truly be able to make art that has any impact.

"Morticia, I'm home!" - Drawn by hand by Michaelplzno

I'm not willing to concede that my art isn't of high enough quality to be popular, but no... no one has eaten one of my drawings. Also, I don't have a publisher, and millions of people haven't bought a book full of my art. I would argue that the curatorial process and its idiosyncrasies (at best) are to blame for why my stuff doesn't make a bigger splash.

Grand conspiracy...

I'm sure that the idea of a grand conspiracy is overblown in my mind, but it is an interesting coincidence that by pushing the sad bois of art, the art world gets easier and easier to manipulate and control. Again, if the artist dies, that is even better for the businesspeople who just want a paycheck and now don't have an artist demanding a cut.

The idea that there is no solo dev who can make it should be a major red flag about how rigged up it all is... not something we just need to roll over and accept.

ignore the audience reaction and keep yelling at a cloud.

Sadly my games barely get any visibility at all, so I don't know what the reaction is. I'd say "Miyamoto didn't have to work this hard to get press" is a valid point, but that was a dust up many years ago that no one remembers about some guy who also complained that everything was in his way.

Mental health

Thank you for checking on my mental health, I have a LOT of support in that regard as I've had a lot of trouble with keeping my sanity (Hence my desire to stick to the more objective rulers of what JSNAKE calls the 2d plane.)

[nathy after dark]

Well, the biggest reason no one can make it as a solo dev is because we live in an era where that's one of the most coveted careers on the planet. People love video games. Everyone wants to make video games. Making video games is now so unbelievably easy compared to the past, that people do it for fun in short bursts of like 4 hours and they put their work out there for free. Supply is astronomically higher than demand. Things may be rigged, but if even if they weren't, the economics just don't work.

[michaelplzno]

Measuring the 2D World - AI in the style of Michaelplzno

It's a shame that the only way to make it is to blast through the barrier so forcefully that you recreate the universe. They say Picasso and Beethoven, even Maurice Sendak and Miyazaki, aren't objectively good; they simply have a lot of fans.

You say I don't listen to the audience, but I've been told many times that people love... love my use of colors. In fact, the coloring is, to some, the most striking element of my drawings. That being said, a guy who ghosted me also told me that colorful drawings aren't considered good by audiences. Now, I know it's all subjective—AKA it's all bullshit—but I hear a lot of contradictions that usually have to do with how the person I'm talking to thinks of me.

I was just told that the key to marketing is to be likable and that there are so many games, the only way someone will root for you is if they like you as a person, rather than judging the art based on any aesthetic principles.

I was also told by a friend that "your art style will outlive you," which is a profound compliment (unless the person was planning on offing me shortly, lol).

My work has been called "Amazing," "Great," "Fantastic," and so on. Even my games have reviews about how original they are and how fun and so on...

So I'm not just a grumpy old man yelling at a cloud. If we are to count up all the comments my art has gotten and sum them up, à la Rotten Tomatoes, I'm probably somewhere in the 80% fresh area.

And of course, if you introduce me as "here is an uppity little snot who thinks his art is better than Miyazaki and Picasso..." then I'm probably going to get a bad review. I posted in the "rude artists group" who said my art belonged hung on the refrigerator with other children's drawings.

Really, I do the ranting because I'm frustrated and it helps to get it out there, and also because I'm told that people need to know you to like your art. Well, stop the world, I want to get on!

[J-Snake]

who said my art belonged hung on the refrigerator with other children's drawings.

The point is right here, and I haven’t seen a clear counter-argument from you on it. Could you clarify? You mentioned that you enjoy being playful, unconstrained, and ‘just yourself’ in your art. Given that, how would you say your work differs from that of a talented child? What unique skill, perspective, or message does your art express that might go beyond a child’s drawing?