Across a good portion of the summer break, my daughter was in love with painting. A lot of what she did was watercolor, but she enjoyed acrylics too. Somewhere along the way, she asked me to join her. I did my best, but honestly, it’s been a few years since I picked up a brush and I was pretty rusty.
I’ve always enjoyed making up little landscapes, and that proved perfect for the tiny canvas boards I’d picked up at the dollar store. Most of my paintings were 5×7 and 4×6, and trying out a few tiny landscapes was a lot of fun because it was just a tiny space, a little spot in the woods or something similar, rather than the sprawling valleys and mountain ranges I’d done before after watching Bob Ross for too many hours.
Coincidentally, this happened around the same time I started playing with things like Midjourney for concept art generation. Sometimes Midjourney would be spot-on, and sometimes it ended up pretty far from what I was looking for. That’s not really a fault of the AI, mind you. Half the appeal is you never know what it’s going to do. Unfortunately, this time, it didn’t offer anything satisfactory for my simple wants: prompts like an autumn forest and a red castle surrounded by maple trees gave me some charming things reminiscent of a children’s picture book, but not quite what I wanted.
My brush, however, understood a bit better.
I’ve always thought it might be nice to do these sort of landscapes, but with a fantasy flair. I don’t know why I haven’t done it, but I guess there’s always time. The autumnal vibe in my upcoming book The Assassin’s Bride seems like it would be a good one to paint, and the red granite castle in Kentoria’s capital has proven a unique challenge for both me and the AI art generators. Haven’t mastered that one by a long shot, but at least forests with an autumn vibe are easy.
How come Bob Ross never painted any castles, anyway?