As a lowly artist myself, I would lovey to chime in on this conversation from my point of view.
Firstly, mans is spitting straight facts. the TL;DR of it is: tracing is okay as a way for lesser developed artists to learn to "git gud"with their craft. Moreover, for artists with more experience in the game, it's kind of a shitty to do, to be somewhat of a gatekeeper on what your view of "good art" is supposed to be, while offering NOTHING in the way of how these lesser developed artists can get better.
THIS^^^ this is absolutely why I operate how I do now. Before I started tinkering around in stable diffusion, there is examples of me legitimately drawing, waaaaaaaaaaaay in the beginning of my profile. I'm not great at it and the furry community offered little to assist me on my journey.
but I REALLY vibed with the section where Bloodhawk states that artists don't really have a good leg to stand on when bashing AI. I just think the whole idea of bashing AI is hypocritical and very selfish. To be clear, I STILL monetarily support hand drawn artists to this day. the way I see it, artists have very little room to criticize AI when the learning process is the same, just WAYYYY faster when you use a computer. Doesn't every good artist learn from many different people's art styles in order to form their own??? AI does that too, just expedited.
the real problem with working with so many high and mighty artists, is that I want to see SOOOOOOOOOOOOO many characters' assholes LMAO. I've made 50+ AI models, half of them based on requests for characters that rarely get love. now do you know how many thousands of dollars that I would have needed to spend, if I wanted to commission all of these characters? not to mention who knows when I ever would have ended up with any of these. I have dealt with a countless amount of artists that for any given reason doesn't get my art piece done on time, or in a reasonable time. I turn to AI because it's open source, I'll NEVER charge for using AI, and people can jack off to the characters they desire, FOR FREE.
I WILL NEVER TELL PEOPLE TO STOP SUPPORTING HAND-DRAWN ARTISTS, but it's difficult to support a lot of you, when the strategy is, learn to draw well, profit, pull the ladder up behind yourself. maybe it's not intentional for a lot of you well developed artists, but that's the way it looks from the outside. And then y'all have the nerve to trash talk AI, when good learning resources and good customer service could have kept this at bay.
But hey, that's what I have to say on the topic. Bloodhawk, good shit, good sir. What do you all think on the topic of good artists, new artist learning resources, and the battle vs AI art?
Myself I taught myself how to draw, because there were lots of things I wanted to see, but either couldn't afford to commission or no one actually draws the characters the way I wanted to see them.
In the very, very beginning I traced for a little while, but.. one does not actually learn anything doing that. You have to gain a feel for how images are created, that's how you can then repose them into something you want to see. So I don't hate tracing, but it's not useful. However! How I did learn was similar, but not tracing. I own now, around 300 coloring books. Why those? Well, if you look at a coloring book image, what do you see? Black lines, and nothing but those! So, from that, you can see more simply what is needed to have an image. Next, you take a page of paper, and you "reference" the image in the book. You figure out, by using circles and other things, how to create the image in the book, onto the paper. To start, the image can look exactly the same, basicly a trace, but not over the actual image. And over time, and doing it many times with the same character, eventually you grasp how it is done, and from there you repose into your own fun stuff! *Also eventually screenshots are equally as good, when you are skillful enough to look past the color to gain more poses* The main skill gain here is "referencing, not tracing"
Now here is the really crazy part. AI, or stable diffusion, doesn't trace. That isn't how the program works. It in fact, works near exactly the same way my coloring book reference situation does. It looks at all the many reference images, and then creates a new image referencing and diffusing common parts of *usually* an enormous data set, using "noise" to build the image layer by layer. I have even proven this, by making images using stable that have character features that were not present in their data set. If it was in fact tracing, how is that possible? The reason the tracing thing has come up though, is because the data set still needs an image to reference from. What happens when the data set for a particular thing, is so small, that there is only one single image to reference from? If you guessed "the output looks the same as the data set image, so it seems like a trace." then you win! So it's not really a trace, it's more a goof, the "artist" needs more reference images, so that it can get enough understanding of whatever thing you want, to change the pose and make something original. It is still a program after all. It has no imagination.
Lastly, artists have a huge advantage using the program too. Personally, I find a lot of the "prompt and go" images to be quite devoid of usefulness. It's just a picture, usually not the most original of poses, and not doing anything of particular use. *It's fine if what you want is just a simple quick fap image though* I'm the sort of person that wants story, and interesting things happening in a picture, or a sequence of images. And presently, that's pretty tough for it to do by itself, it just does not have enough reference images of certain tasks, or even a specific pose you need for a comic, *comic poses are often very unique* to do anything like that.. at least not by itself..
The program is changing though, and it's had updates added to it that are game changers. Controlnet being one of the biggest. Being able to draw a unique image pose *yourself*, and then put it into stable to help finish the image adding vibrant color and a background, is proving to be an amazing time saver, with absolutely stunning results. It's even starting to venture into being able to do full animation, and I feel that in the future it's going to blossom out into even more things. Yet again, I'm not sure it will ever be able to do all of it by itself, I'm pretty sure it won't. It really needs that art director/creator to hone and focus it's tremendous speed and power to get a truly unique and good result.
Myself I taught myself how to draw, because there were lots of things I wanted to see, but either co
I disagree, with the notion that tracing isn't helpful personally, I traced in the beginning and from tracing so much, I put it together in my head where parts of the body were supposed to end up I think at a point, it crosses over and tracing then TURNS into referencing
also thanks for the AI art lesson, I'M aware that there's no tracing of anything in that process, but it should still be discussed as it's a contentious alternative to learning the long way. A way that has no easy entry points, which would lead some down the pipeline of needing to trace in the first place
I disagree, with the notion that tracing isn't helpful personally, I traced in the beginning and fro
