One of the most fun things to do with the AI Art apps is using a doodle to make AI art. It’s a very easy process. I use the Procreate app to create a really simple image, and then feed it into Wombo AI app with some descriptive prompts.
What’s great about this process is that it’s fast – you can quickly start working on an idea and evolve it. The end product can be really quite beautiful. I prefer the Wombo Dream app for this process. The other apps I’ve been using (Dall-E and NightCafe) are great at doing what you tell them to do, but Wombo Dream tends to be really good at cooking up some aesthetically interesting things. And it’s free, so you can do many iterations until you get something you like.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with some Jean Arp type images. He is one of my favorite sculptors. His style is so minimalistic yet satisfying. Here are a couple examples of what I made:
The changes that the AI makes are subtle, but you can see how you powerful it is. Imagine turning any little doodle into a 3D object. I wish I had the ability to actually make these sculptures. I suspect the technology to do that is not far behind.
Here are some real Jean Arp sculptures for comparison:
Still Life Doodles to AI Art
Next let’s look at some still life ideas. Again, this is a really fast process, so you can quickly and intuitively evolve these into whatever you can think of. As you’re doing it, you really get a feel for what AI is capable of. Even just making very simple (fake) still lives here, you start to think about the infinity of options – changing the setting, the background, the table, the objects, the color of the objects, the styles of painting… it can quickly get overwhelming, and yes, even scary. I was thinking about how the AI “knows” how to paint like a Gaugin or a Cezanne – how far off are we from having a kind of upload of an artist’s brain? If anything can be reproduced “in the style of Gaugin,” does that effectively give the artist a dimension of immortality?
Evolution of a doodle to a realistic image
Another thing that’s fun is to take a doodle, and evolve it. Each time you get something more realistic looking, you feed THAT image into the AI and see where it takes you. Here is an evolution of a bowl of marbles, starting from the doodle:
Anyone can try using a doodle to make AI art
Another great thing about this process is that it is available and free to anyone who has an iPhone. The Wombo Dream ai app is free, and you can take your pick of any number of free sketching apps. The one thing to remember is to use a portrait oriented image to start with (rather than landscape orientation) because your final image from Wombo Dream is always portrait oriented. I’ll leave you with one final example: a statue experiment. I tried to make the doodle similar to how museum websites tend to display marble statues, with a gray background. Again, it’s fun and intuitive, and this took less than 5 minutes:
