Happy Halloween & Samhain, friends!

I’ve caught up pretty well since the last update, and made the Saturnian golden Solaroid of late summer, seed modeled by arting teacher Kelsey. The best way to get a (multi-directional) calendar poster, print, or affordable original in this series of seasonal aliens remains the Kickstarter, which I will be closing to late pledges November 1. There are two paintings remaining in the cycle!

This closes out my Analog Imagination project of generating reference-free paintings from your prompts in a php form on my site, and also how I started doing the 12 pigment themed cycle structure. Really disappointingly slow and tame, maybe because my turnaround time was emphatically not that of a GenAI. I am open to actual commissions, or will likely be able to do them after I finish Solaroids in mid to late November. All images are free to use or train with or what have you, but original paintings and prints are for sale.

Two, in particular, will be in LIC-A’s annual Affordable Holiday Art Show, Off the Wall, named for how you can take the art you buy right away, and all payment goes to the artists. The opening will be Thursday, November 5, 6-9pm, at Culture Lab LIC, with live music and snacks and tons of accessibly-priced gifts including these recent little Analog Imagination pieces made to fit their frames. The show stays up through Sunday, December 13, with evening viewing hours, some of which I will probably be monitoring.

I managed to somewhat pin down my kid for another live portrait sitting, barely. I’m not sure I will attempt that challenge again. I think the emotions that come through in this pose is one of the many ways we’re doing our best to follow them about who they’re becoming, at this age. Anyway, I’ll happily do kid portraits! Mostly from photos though.

I have already deactivated my personal Facebook, although my professional page persists unmaintained. In response to “Muse”, and to instagram threatening to coerce consent of all business accounts of their platform to allow content on any website associated with their business to be scraped for AI training data, I urge you to join me in leaving Meta platforms before November 20. I hope it doesn’t come to that and they at least allow an opt out, although I have no illusions that this is a legal fig leaf and just like everyone else they help themselves to any public images anyway. Excepting Analog Imagination, I have been using Nightshade on all my recent work, but haven’t gone through the effort of retroactively Glazing my previous art. In the meantime, thank you for your subscription, and while it is still Social Media with all the associated issues, and by no means anti-AI, I mainly use Bluesky, and continue to post (but not really scroll) on Tumblr. Redundancy is key!

Thanks for your eyes,
I’m 42 now,
don’t be a stranger,