Fasten your seatbelts for another exciting ride with Stable Digest!
First stop, we're featuring the inimitable Haze Long, a maestro who flawlessly fuses old-world artistry with new-age technology.
🏳️🌈 Celebrations are in the air for Pride Month! Be sure not to miss our co-venture with the Tate for their vibrant "Queer and Now" festival.
Lastly, your trip won't be complete without our usual showcase of mesmerising art pieces, invigorating community happenings, and the latest product debuts!
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Have suggestions for artists spotlights or community features? Email us community@stability.ai
BY THE COMMUNITY
PANTHEON WINNERS
Take a moment to marvel at some of the extraordinary victors from our Pantheon Channel - the pinnacle of imagery crafted with our SDXL beta bot in Discord! It’s almost as if you are watching the model being trained in real time! Oh wait, that is exactly what is happening 😉
From top left to bottom right: huythuy, Meng, Kambeii, sleepyrobot, praman, Wizard Whitbeard
Let's keep this momentum going - continue to create, vote, and together, we can make SDXL the best it can be!
Interested in gaining your place on the Pantheon Stage? Well check out our Discord Bot and start creating!
WINNERS OF THE WEEK
Heads up, creativity aficionados! While our POW challengers take a much needed rest, ourCOW challengers are keeping us on our toes, and we can't contain our excitement to share their work with you!
Cruising in as our COW titans, Parzival masterfully strips back layers with Minimal, a testament to the beauty of simplicity. Meanwhile, tazi shows us how Trailblazers catapults us headlong into uncharted territories.
Parzival - Minimal
tazi - Trailblazers
Head on over to the Community Events on the Discord and earn your chance to be highlighted!
FAILED DIFFUSIONS
Ever heard of the saying, 'one man’s trash is another’s treasure'? We revel in the weird, the wacky, and the wonderfully unpredictable. That’s precisely why we created a cozy little corner for these 'beautiful blunders' on Discord - theFailed-Diffusionschannel! So, prepare to have your socks knocked off by a smorgasbord of our recent favorites.
From top left to bottom right: stranger, pseudoterminalx, bidesottom
Want to turn your trash into treasure and get featured in our digest? Join the funtoday!
WITH THE COMMUNITY
STABLE SOCIETY DEEP DIVE - HAZE LONG
Be humble, be grateful.
Thank you so much for being here! We are so excited to learn more about you and your art! You’ve painted over 100 murals, performed stage speed painting and now work in AI-deconstructed digital art. We are curious,how do you think your experiences in all these different art forms interact and influence each other?
Thank you for having me, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I am blessed with a fruitful career that I cherish and have made sacrifices for. My journey as an artist has led me to be treated as a celebrity when I speed paint and ironically, as a hard labourer as a muralist. This enabled me to experience both sides of the coin and defines who I am today.
Haze Long - Mural for Porsche
In a nutshell, murals and speed paintings are part of my corporate career as a commissioned artist/entrepreneur, I am the client’s paintbrush. I do not put my identity as an artist before my job. It was never my style or my content. This led me to yearn and seek a unique style and an identity in another community that recognises my talent. My experience of being a commissioned artist and my background in coding led me to be interested in AI art and web3.
You've said "AI is my muse, my inspiration, not my crutch," which really highlights your approach to tech in art. Could you tell us more about how you use AI to spice up, rather than replace, your classic artistic style? For example, you’ve mentioned how you used AI in your "Synthetic Heartbeats" collection to get all your colors to play nice together.
In working with AI, I discovered a variety of workflows. One could generate a batch of visuals and then collage them together. Or just generate a simple prompt to illustrate something quickly. In the beginning when my prompt skills were amateur, I was cleaning up my prompted visuals majority of the time. All these led me to wonder how I could use a workflow that gives me freedom instead of enslaving me to AI.
Since then, I spent the majority of my time exploring various workflows and ways to utilize AI. I seek workflows instead of targeted artistic outputs. From these various workflows, I pick the golden prompts and use that as my muse and inspiration.
Synthetic Heartbeats, 2023
The Synthetic Heartbeats collection has about 150 artworks out of 200 generations. Every prompt and workflow has its limit and I hit the limit at about 40 generations in. From then on, the probability of getting a good prompt was really low. It is these moments that gives us the opportunity to push the limit by trying something new within the same constraints. So I ended up with 200 portraits of different color schemes and styles. I then re-prompted all of them as INIT with another custom trained model in order to restyle all of them. As for the color scheme, I use dustfreesolutions to re-color all of them.
Color coordinating a huge collection
You are a bit of a Renaissance woman, with a plethora of different interests. How do you juggle your business aspirations, your passion for mathematics and code, and your artistic endeavours? Does one feed into another or do you keep each area of your life in its own box?
When I was younger, I definitely got lost trying this and that. These days, I focus only on my artistic endeavours and everything else is second to it. Running the business is second nature to me as I have been doing this for more than a decade. I can get overwhelmed but from where I am from, putting eggs in many baskets when you are an artist can do wonders for your career.
Haze Long - Eternity_X
Your talent for speed painting, being able to complete an artwork within the duration of a song, is remarkable. Could you share with us how you learned this unique skill and how you decide which ideas to express and which details to focus during a performance? Does this practice help in your decision-making process when you are working on big NFT projects?
I actually started out just painting as a performance. After a while, it makes more sense to finish the painting in the duration of a song. Then, viral videos of other speed painters started popping up and the term was coined.
I perform on a rotating easel, the rotation helps me move around the painting more efficiently and quickly. Each time I reach for a new load of paint or a new brush takes precious time. I time all these movements and I count all my brush strokes to train for speed. This practice helps me perform a unique and different piece each time. I also prioritize certain details depending on drying speed and movement speed.
Haze Long performing on stage under KLCC twin towers
There’s a misconception that the speed painted art holds value. However, speed painting itself is the art, the performance is the art. The artwork itself is not going to be as detailed or realistic compared to an artwork with many hours invested in its’ making. This opened my mind to accept that art has many forms and with speed painting, investing in the performance is the right way to go. As for NFTs, the value can also be in the utility, experience or code instead of the artwork. Understanding these differences can be enlightening.
In a discussion with NFTCulture, you spoke about breaking free from the restrictions of client work with your popular YouTube channel. Can you talk about how trying out new things in the public eye and teaching others have shaped your art style or made a difference in how you approach your own art?
I started out with an Instagram account, after many years and tries, it gained traction through a combination of engineered actions and luck. It is a process that I can replicate.
My Youtube channel, however, gained popularity out of sheer luck. It happened a year before the pandemic and was my saving grace during COVID. A Procreate time lapse drawing video went viral and since then, I started my “pay-what-you-want” model of offering Procreate brushes.
Very quickly, I realized that content mattered more than the art. Click baits, lists, top 10s, reviews, hauls and reaction videos are the way to go in order to gain popularity. However, all the effort in making these videos will not contribute to my growth as an artist. If I require 1 hour to complete a painting, shooting it at the same time will turn the same process into 3 hours + 8 hours of editing. It is a glamour that requires dedication, something that I do not really have naturally.
Haze Long - Homework for the Falling
"Born to Die" and "Anti Norm" both seem to challenge established power structures and advocate for equality and freedom. What moves you to incorporate these strong social themes in your art, especially in a world that's changing fast and getting more divided? And how do your personal experiences influence your perspectives on these issues?
My NFTs are precious in the sense that every single one of them is personal. I do not really contemplate about navigating controversy or social themes, these worries are for my corporate career as a commissioned artist. In web3, I can be myself and express my views. However, I do notice that certain collections can never be on billboards due to the content. I can accept that.
I was pretty much on the fence and neutral about everything in the world before I got into web3. The community gave me the strength and courage to be myself. It is an empowering place to be.
Haze Long - anti-hero, Lucifer, HELLO-OH
You've said that discovering the Tezos blockchain was a game-changer in your NFT journey. How do you see different blockchain technologies influencing the future of NFT art? Is there one blockchain you'd say is the best fit for artists?
At that point in time, I promoted my NFT project in my Youtube channel naively thinking I can get sales that way. I was cancelled by my subscribers and I decided to get back on Twitter. It was a horrid welcome - scams, ETH promoters, shillers, fakers, harems. I couldn’t promote my NFT, it was like shouting into a crowded stadium.
Haze Long - Floral Rebirth
I then discovered artists talking about Tezos, minting selling. I connected with them and found this safe haven. Gas fees are low and the community is so supportive and warm. I think that artists will instantly be drawn to certain blockchains depending on who they are. To me, Tezos is my home.
Haze Long - Phthalo Dreams
Some traditional artists might worry that AI tech could take away the authenticity or 'human touch' from their art. From what you've seen, how can these artists use AI to give their art a boost, rather than take something away? Could you give us an example from your own work where AI made your art even better?
I painted AI prompted artwork on canvas with oils. It was an experiment to see if my tradition skills can execute AI art.
I think it will be cool to see printed AI art as a base or grisaille, before the artist adds more strokes to make it his own. Conceptualizing with AI is a huge upgrade in speed as well.
However, I think with AI, trad artists can experiment with mixed media in a way that hasn’t been done before. For example mixing watercolors with oils, textile with acrylics on plastic, something impossible like that. By conceptualizing these mixes in AI can sometimes hint to us how to execute it in trad art.
I am currently exploring ink mixed with oils and sculpture, on both canvas and paper. It’s simulated in AI and I plan to explore this until I am confident to work on the physical version.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us! Would you like to share any additional thoughts with us and our community of readers, or give shoutouts to anyone who has been an inspiration to you along the way?
Thank you 🙂
Here’s a secret only some know - I went into web3 because of Jenni Pasanen. I am a huge fan of her. I keep screenshots of her replies to me.
Be humble, be grateful.
FOR THE COMMUNITY
Clipdrop Uncrop
Sick of pics that just don’t quite fit the frame? The image-inators at Clipdrop have developed the perfect solution—Uncrop, built on SDXL, is the outpainting tool that expands your snaps with a whole new background story! And the best part? Uncrop’s all dressed up in an easy peasy interface and ready to rock your world!
So upload your cropped cutie and watch in wonder as Uncrop works its magic, analyzing every pixel to imagine what could’ve been lurking just out of frame. In a flash, your 4x6 is a panorama. Your profile pic’s ready for a billboard!
Wanna pack that big brain with more of the deets? Check out our blog!
Speaking of Clipdrop, this weekend Uncrop unleashed its creative superpowers at the Tate’s artstravaganza “Beyond the Frame” event! As part of the Tate’s “Queer and Now” fest celebrating LGBTQIA+ culture, visitors got to re-masterpiece some of the Tate’s most famed works using Uncrop’s AI magic.
Teaming up with the Tate and Electronic Life, Stability AI’s Clipdrop transformed Tate Britain into an inclusive artspace where anyone could co-create a virtual dream museum!
Original Take Your Son, Sir! by Ford Madox Brown and its extended Clipdrop (Stability AI) generated artwork.
#DIFFUSETOGETHER CHALLENGE WINNERS!
Missed the the awards show? Fret not, we've got the VOD ready for you! Packed with fun and fanfare, we proudly rolled out the winners' list of the #diffusetogether challenge – a rockin' rendezvous with none other than Peter Gabriel!
Stepping up on the third podium, we had the dazzling Oraguerillatan! Riding the wave to second place was the unparalleled Vnderworld! And seizing the spotlight, we had not one, but two superstars, Junie Lau and Lam Son, sharing the top honours!
But that's not all! The winners didn't just walk away with bragging rights, oh no! They pocketed some seriously impressive swag, including a shiny new 4090 GPU and a whopping $10,000 in commissions each, courtesy of Mr. Gabriel himself!
For a full scoop of this funfest, the VOD for the #DiffuseTogether Award Event is now up and running on YouTube!
Keen to know what the rock legend himself, Peter, had to say about the contest? Find his exclusive thoughts right here!
And folks, don't unbuckle your seatbelts just yet! We're just revving up the engine on this thrilling series of challenges. Stay tuned as we gear up for the next lap of creativity!
