For massive improvement on my first month art journey:

• Make quick sketching as habit, even though just five to ten minutes are enough. I gotta force myself. Draw something that I like.

• Rewatch the fundamental course, I hoard many gigs of courses on my drive back in highschool until art-uni. Rewatch and practice fundamental again are enough, recalling shape, line, gesture, composition.

• Explore workflow for “How to make the process creation 10x fun.” it’s a real banger. That’s why now in anatomy I use Sketchfab, Blender, MMD, and VRoid as the best 3D reference.

• Use the forbidden technique of learning things: “Reverse engineering” I can gather a bunch of references of my favorite artist, break them down, make the color flat again, trace the inside anatomy, make it black and white value, restyle. You learn by breaking things and rebuilding your own.

• And the controversial part, make AI as your friend for learning companion, not as your final output. Split the definition between tool and intelligence. I can use my local machine and local model. ComfyUI for breaking the image component with Controlnet, their lineart, their pose, their depth, relighting on many different sides, it’s basically like filtering on steroids. And now open source video model is really getting better.

• It’s such a blessing for the tool. Unfortunately, the sentiment of AI and art is dichotomy, much blindspot, if you look on the mainstream internet it’s a toxic area. That’s why I have to take seriously the practice of cognitive security for telling myself which is the real use case, which is the fact, which is the opinion. Neutralize my feeling toward tools, it took me years to realize that.

• I could talk about discourse in that perspective of art and tech. I love both worlds very much. I’ve been observing them since the beginning.

• Build strong unshakeable creative philosophies in the current tech paradigm and the future. I should build the philosophies even though there will be AGI/ASI, or whatever Machine God will be, I will still: creating > consuming.

• Share it. For me this is the interesting part. I’m glad in my bubble right now full of curious minds in a broad range of disciplines: tech, ai/ml, dev, art. So I feel comfortable when I mention broad things. Imagine if I continue with my past self in an alternate universe as an artist talking about clanker, I will be witch hunted. So thank you.

• Finally, have fun! imagine not having fun? I encourage all of you to create beautiful things with your own hand and keyboard too. So good luck on the journey!