Lately, I’ve been doing a good amount of digital art. I’m trying to be disciplined with myself and work on some fundamentals at the same time, such as thumbnailing and studies, but I’m not super good at that part. I think I want to make myself a bit of a schedule, so I have more structure to my practice. That would probably be helpful to keeping my skills fresh and limber.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I have started using a program called Nightshade. You may have heard of it, or maybe not. It allows me to add a bit of poison to my artworks. This poison isn’t visible to us humans, and the artwork is seemingly unchanged. But for those devious AI programs that scrape the internet for images to steal from, it’s a horrible mess. That’s the purpose of using Nightshade on my artwork. I want to fuck up as much of that stuff as possible, because I want to accelerate the death of AI art-theft programs (which is all of them, as they currently exist.)

So that’s how I’m doing my part to make the change I want to see in this world. Anyway, let’s get on with the actual art content.

This artwork is one I finished just last night. I’m really happy with how it turned out. I haven’t done a lot of realistic studies from photos in a long time, so it took a little while for me to get going. Once I got in the swing of things, I started really having fun working on this piece and I’m quite proud of the results. This is my partner’s parents’ cat, Tai, sitting cutely in an empty bag that I had left on the floor. I made it using Clip Studio Paint, on my iPad. It took me several hours, through multiple painting sessions.

I have a bit of complaining to do now. Not about my painting or anything, but about my iPad. I was getting frustrated at the Files app opening videos in Procreate automatically, so I deleted Procreate in a fit of irritation. I didn’t think it though, though, because it turns out my art folder was within the Procreate folder on my iPad, and so all of my files are now gone. All the Clip Studio files of my artworks, all the logos and banners and business designs, all of everything. Gone. Irretrievable. I’m so annoyed at myself for not checking before deleting Procreate.

I might have to recreate some things, and I’ll have to start over on some things. I didn’t lose absolutely everything – I did have a good amount backed up on my laptop or in the cloud – but a vast majority is now lost. So, learn from my mistake: never delete a big app like that without double-checking that it won’t also delete important files. Sigh.