Unlock Your Inner Artist: How AI can Help you Learn Watercolour Painting
I began by feeding in scrappy sketches to Midjourney.
From a single-line sketch on a tablet, I produced a short picture story for children. My mum gave me a watercolour set. Now I am reproducing the Midjourney produced images in watercolours and teaching myself how to paint. I print out an image I like in black and white (no colour printer) and make a copy by hand.
The idea for “Jack Goes To the beach” came to me four years ago in a therapy session. I was doing Inner Child work. Combined with some mindfulness techniques, I used my non-dominant hand to sketch an idea of my inner child.
Out popped Jack! A young boy with sticky-up blonde hair lived on the beach and happily played in the sea, sand dunes and rock pools. Jack was as basic as the sketch below in all my drawings, which I created on my reMarkable2 tablet.
Once you find your inner child, they tend to stick around. He’s had loads of adventures in my head and is never bothered by responsibilities. He cartwheels, plays throughout the day and gets all his needs met by being himself. He is a great teacher.
Four months ago, a lovely friend and fellow obsessive, Tom Morley, introduced me to the AI art generator Midjourney. For weeks I disappeared down the rabbit hole creating endless selfies and pictures of robots as if drawn by Van Goch.
Then something clicked. I am a storyteller, I could use these pictures with my stories. I began adding AI images to my counselling-related articles on Medium. I created images of “Doors to another world” and “Setting sail into the unknown”. This shifted to creating a pack of image cards for my counselling practice.
I then began mulling around ideas of creating consistent characters in MJ. I played around and wrote a couple of very successful articles on it.
Jack finally hit the page in this article:
I had been feeding in pencil sketches and getting a variety of results. All had a ridiculous number of fingers. Most were a variation on this prompt:
[handrawnImage.jpg] A boy with blonde hair and blue eyes playing in the sand dunes
The story of Jack had been born, but it didn’t quite click because the images were too photorealistic. There were some very strong contenders for the role of Jack.
But I was beginning to realise I wanted something that looked like a hand-drawn set of images. It was also much easier to get consistency with graphic novel-type images.
The turning point was the introduction of Niji, a part of Midjourney dedicated to Manga/anime graphics.
It took a while to get used to Niji as at first the images were too stylized and didn’t fit in with how I saw jack. Then I inserted this phrase:
an illustrated pen and watercolour panel from a graphic novel
From here on I was getting consistent usable images, and I began creating the picture story “Jack Goes to the Beach”
These images still needed much processing in Photoshop before they got into the story. Most had a chin that was too pointed and had to be rounded off. Fingers had to be amputated, mouth shape was changed expressions were tweaked.
This process got me interested in producing watercolours myself by hand. It was like I was being given good examples; if I similarly created my own starter images, I could get better and more consistent results. I found that by copying the Midjourney examples, my own watercolour skills increased exponentially. Perhaps that’s an overstatement, they went from zero to something approaching almost possibly a usable sketch.
A bit of work to do on the face and nose. The legs also look wonky in MJ’s version and my copy. Maybe if I feed that last image back in AI will sort it out.
So finally to all you AI haters out there, this process has rekindled my interest in creating my own artwork by hand. I’ve always written stories but have never been able to afford to pay an artist to get them published. Now that I have pulled Midjourney to my box of tools, I can create illustrated tales for the amusement of thousands. Or at least my grandchildren. Who knows one day, I may increase my watercolour skills to the point where they need very little processing to get on the page.
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