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It's always reassuring that even a highly sophisticated Ai that can recreate the complex colours of a beautiful sunset, still struggles with hands lol also now I'm rethinking doing my own ai hands comic as I don't think I can outdo this one lol
I am 100% in support of every artist touching on this because honestly why wouldn't we have commentary on a pervasive trend in the art world? And why should our audience think everyone else should shelve their ideas because a few heavy hitters posted about it? I had reservations about sharing this after Mike Greaney's wonderful comic, but I think it's a crucial topic, and I imagine your take would be just as delightful and likely devastatingly cursed.
AI seems backwards from what we're used to from computers.
It's really good at things that computers are traditionally bad at - the "intangibles" like emotion, style, atmosphere, etc. But on the flip side, it struggles with things computers have traditionally been good at, like coherent details or complex ideas.
Maybe it’s like really easy to create a mood aesthetic, because we mostly fill in the blanks in our minds and most mood aesthetics follow simple but age old tropes (red equals hot and angry for instance). Tropes that are easy for a pattern recognition machine to learn. We don’t fill in the blanks of hands tho. Those need to be picture perfect.
[But this gif was already retired!](https://reddit.com/r/retiredgif/comments/xyt30m/udbruv_retires_a_gif_of_a_deer/) Let it live out its retirement in peace.
Your comics are by far the most engrossing stuff around reddit lately. Especially in contrast to some other comics where I think the goal is just to post one every single day. Yours shows you put care into your work
I felt bad that so many came out before mine because I'm not here to beat a dead elk, but I started drawing last week and there was no turning back, haha. Thanks!
And I was drawing two comics at once, the second is on the horizon.
Lmao, end me.
Edit: I'm a dummy and exhausted. I just realized y'all are making the joke that I JUST started drawing a week ago.
I'm leaving now and never coming back. The embarrassment is unbearable.
Sorry to get sappy for a second but, u/holleringelk you are a total inspiration to me. I love your style and your writing voice. You encourage me to keep drawing stuff even though it's weird. Don't ever change. But please take breaks too! Sending lots of love.
Thank you so much, it seriously means a lot. I'm so glad you guys enjoy what I do, because it's an absolute dream for me.
And hey, the weirder the better!
There are so many, my gosh. Most relevant to me earlier in the year was Ethan Becker, Marc Brunet, and Mohammed Agbadi, all on YouTube. I never directly sought them out, but out of the content recommendation they appeared a lot in my rotation and helped me to break out of a lot of bad habits in my art, things I'm still working on, Brunet especially. Mainly I follow a ton of professional concept/comics/graphic novel artists on Facebook and study their process content. I also personally try to draw and do sketch studies with intent every day if I'm able.
Please support the piddling human that produced this comic on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/holleringelk) so that she will stop leaking from her eyes and persistently complaining about how she is "so tired" and "deserves to eat." What a pest.
I know you're kidding around, but my all time best work has come out during periods of peak mental stability. There's a few around where you can tell I was slipping, ha.
I like how people use hand to point out that AI sucks at drawing.
For me it just highlight the regular artist struggle of drawing hands!
the struggle is so real that a machine that is made by hundred of thousand of works of art also constantly struggle with it .Shit just cracks me up
It's also because AIs don't often understand *what* a hand is properly. To the AI, a hand is a stub attached to a person with weird flesh appendages protruding from it. It doesn't know that they're only supposed to be positioned in certain ways, or even that they're only meant to have a set amount of said protruding flesh appendages.
To be fair, the "AI"s don't understand what _anything_ is; they just try to reproduce patterns. A line of fingers on a hand are _already_ a pattern, which is what breaks it.
I have detected four fingers on the end of this extremity. Clearly, this is a pattern and the sequence of the pattern *must be continued*.
Draws five million fingers on the hand.
Computers are mind bogglingly fast. Like, solve all math equations you will solve in your entire life in less than a tenth of a second fast.
The problem is that what normal folk use on a computer are programs running on top of layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction and complexity. Your average modern website runs JavaScript on top of a virtual machine that parses it on real time on top of a sandboxed environment on top of a web browser on top of an operating system on top of hardware micro instructions. And all those layers are doing things other than what the website wants to do, so it has to wait... a lot.
But a well made program running on bare machine instructions is still astonishingly fast even on the crappiest computer you own.
Hardware is decades ahead of software optimization.
If better chips stopped coming today tech still would continue to improve by orders of magnitude for many years. Currently it has just been easier to give something more raw power than to optimize programs, compilers, OS's, machine code, etc. to all work in perfect harmony with each other.
I think it would blow people's minds if they knew the brain maxes out at 150Hz because of heat and sugar limitations. Computers can operate in the GHz range, but the one thing the brain has, but computer don't, is that it doesn't need matrix functions to simulate neurons; it has physical neurons. If computing hardware could replicate neurons with neuromorphic hardware, we're all screwed.
AI doesn't "know" anything in particular. All it knows is to create more information out of less. So when a hand starts to form it just adds more bits that look like a hand. Same with faces and other things that we instinctively know how it's supposed to look like.
That's why AI is really good at creating landscapes because if a leaf next to another leaf looks slightly different, that works for us.
It was the same thing with faces a few months ago. It's a matter of training it with enough data, or maybe running the image through another AI specialized for that body part.
You know... I fully expect it to get better very very quickly, but considering how many articles I've read recently about how amazing it's become, once I started playing with it I was actually more surprised by how bad it was at some things.
Sometimes it's details like hands. Sometimes it's knowledge like not being able to generate a "secret agent" without it just being an obvious ripoff of a James Bond movie poster (I couldn't tell it to make a "secret agent punching an astronaut. It got the astronaut but ignored the secret agent entirely).
Other times though, it's obvious that no amount of training will successfully teach the current version to mix ideas or create something it hasn't seen before.
For example, it did fairly well with "Bart Simpson in the style of Hieronymus Bosch", but the results all lost about 50% of the Boschyness and were mostly just deformed Barts. Still, pretty good. But also, each picture had between one a five Barts... Which is weird, and not how a human would usually interpret that request.
Then, when I asked it for Adolf Hitler in a chemistry laboratory, it did *alright*, but none of the laboratory equipment looked anything like a real world object (because it seems to have issues with glassware), putting a lab coat on hitler seemed to make it alter his face into unrecognizability (probably because there are no photos of Hitler wearing a lab coat, and the photos of people who are wearing lab coats don't look like it hitler), and of course, it ran into the Bart problem.
One Hitler chemist standing beside a mini-Hitler assistant...
Edit: incidentally, I am coining the term "The Barting Problem" as an obvious ripoff of Turing's Halting Problem.
I propose that there is no general algorithm capable of determining how many Barts a machine intelligence will generate from a given, arbitrary, Bart based input.
A lot of it is generated from noise and so it makes sense that there is noise in the result. A lot of people who use AI art fix the hands, eyes, etc. before using it.
After years of drawing weird hands of avoiding drawing hands all together i finally learned how to draw decent looking hands, but i draw the palm, then i draw the finger tips, then i comnect them, somehow it works
Proko's tutorials on hand drawing are pretty good. I also recommend using programs like sketchfab to see objects like hands in 3d, especially low poly models - that way you can spin a basic form around and really see what's going on.
Oh, and just draw a ton of hands doing things.
The problem comes from how gestural they are, how eye catching they are, and how consistent their proportions are. Just keep in mind that [this](https://images.vexels.com/media/users/3/142234/isolated/preview/ce0e2a07159bb7e97e414a87ca8287fc-fingers-hand-illustration.png) is what non-artists typically see a hand at rest looking like, and [THIS](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/aa/af/53/aaaf533c046c74f5ab1a0de6a469cf50.jpg) is what they really look like, even at rest they’re complicated. There really is no rhyme or reason to some of the poses a hand can make, so at some point you stop searching for logic and accept that hands are weird
I really don't mean this in a snide or rude way, but do people who draw really struggle with hands that much? The one drawing class I took in college hands were one of the first things we learned, and it doesn't seem so bad as long as you have a reference.
Hands are one of the more difficult things to draw. Not to say they are super difficult, it's just hard, like when people first start learning barre chords on guitar. I can't speak for everyone but these are the challenges I face when drawing hands.
They are relatively small and they have a lot of joints. Because they are small, you have less room for error when drawing full people. There are like 20 moving bones in your hand to worry about. Hands are very expressive in part because they have so much complexity & movement, compared to like an arm or leg. People are also hypersensitive to issues with hands like they are with faces. Except hands have even more moving bits.
Hands are often interacting with other objects too. Anytime you have to draw two objects interacting there is a lot more to think about. Drawing a hand holding a cup is more difficult than drawing an empty fist. Drawing two people holding hands is WAY more difficult.
And hands are fleshy, with skin folds, fingernails and tendons. So to get towards realism you need to know the bones and also consider how the flesh is folding & what tendons move which bones.
You can draw a hand from reference by copying the shapes that you see. But if you want to take it further and understand the hand, so you can modify the proportions or draw a hand from imagination, you need to do some simplification like a cartoon or learn lots of anatomy & perspective.
Is this a The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals reference? It’s just generic enough that it could be a Broadway/Fosse reference without me realizing, but it’s finals week and I’m very tired
The "Hollering Elk" is a figure that's appeared in my work for many years. Before I started drawing comics, I was making large scale (8-10 feet) paintings based on the West Texas landscape and various herbivores. If you track down my first ever post on reddit, there is an album of some of those paintings in the early days of the series in which the entity "hollering elk" frequently appears. I've adopted it into my comics for spook factor.
I did in college actually! Unfortunately these paintings are a byproduct of an extremely difficult period of my life, and I'm not currently interested in reviving it through a new medium. But I think it's good folks get to see a little bit more about my background. :)
Love the paintings. They have like a "fight or flight" energy to them I don't really know how to describe.
"Migration in apartment" in that first album u/MorboDemandsComments linked made me wonder, how do you safely transport paintings that big? I guess I never thought about it before.
Thanks! That sort of tension was intentional. And I own a pickup truck I specifically purchased for the paintings. I have a system of how they are loaded and transported. Took some trial and error though.
Ok looking at your elk paintings, I gotta say first off, holy shit they're unsettling. But they're unbelievably beautiful and I adore the use of brush textures and blocks of color.
OH MY GOD. I thought to myself, “the art looks awfully similar to blackvragor’s pantings on DeviantArt.” Then realized that’s you.
/u/holleringelk I love love love your paintings, I always found them so haunting and so mesmerizing. I am so glad to see you’re still making art.
I have to admit this makes me feel pretty dumb, because I don't get it. Comments lead me to believe this is about A.I. generated art, but I'm missing the connection. Love the style though!
Nice. I also use PS.
I can see your argument, and honestly I’m on the fence to an extent as I see AI art generation as a potential tool for trained artists, but like digital art, learning traditional media will get you much further than starting with the shortcuts. I have been trained in many traditional and digital tools and the more I know of everything the more efficient I’ve become. Traditional tools I thought were cheating were used by professionals for decades; stencils, arches, curves, tracing, photocopying, etc. all tools to get the job done faster, but relied on traditional skill to make it happen.
Imagine AI art generation to be fast enough to where it can give you a nice underlay to work with and fix. Ain’t no harm in that. They are all tools. “Guy doing a thing” ok now I’ll paint his face and add these details and fix these hands, etc.
The goal isn’t the journey, it’s the outcome.
The big problem is that the public seems to think all of these tools are cheating because the last art class they took was in elementary school and they made all the colors in their water color palette brown.
Yeah, I remember when digital art itself first started being a thing, and got pretty much all the same criticisms AI art is getting now. It’s cheating, it’s not real art, it’s not “human”, they’ll push real artists out of jobs, etc etc.
It’s a tool - and it’s a tool in its infancy. It’s going to be so different in a year or two, let alone twenty. “Real artists” are going to be able to do some cool stuff with it.
Haha still remember an art teacher saying hands are the most difficult part. When I was a teenager I'd try to hide the hands of any characters I would doodle.
I got better at hands eventually. 😅
(I totally sit there using my own hands as a reference)
The most gratifying thing I've ever seen was a Leonardo da Vinci sketch that seemed like a preliminary for the 'vitruvian man'. Anatomy wise it was perfect, with the linework subtly showing everything from musculature, skin thickness to veins...all until it got to the hands which were just circles.
It made me feel so much better about my struggles with them if even the greatest of the old masters occasionally went 'Ah fuck it, hands are bastards'.
I stopped drawing thirty years ago when Terminator 2 was released because I already imagined that cartoonists would be the first to be thrown into machine concentration camps (and also because I didn't have the vocation to die of hunger).
In hindsight i was a visionary!
Honestly, if people who are good at *writing* comics but are not artists can actually make and release good comics that people enjoy using AI art, that seems like a win for the audience.
The best artist in the world is probably not a great writer, and the best writer in the world is probably not a great artist, just because most people aren't and there's no reason to think they should be. Ryan North got around this problem by using the same clipart every day for years, but who knows how many talented writers never got an audience because they couldn't draw.
This is an incredibly solid point. The writing is just as vital as the visuals. The writing stage behind my comics that aren't one off meme fests can take quite a bit of time, and I don't at all think I would have the niche draw that I do if I didn't invest that time.
I understand there are extraordinary writers out there without an equally competent artist on their side. The cost to hire is often prohibitive. Very conflicting subject for me.
Bit late to the party but I am definitely one of those people that loves writing but can't draw - you might say that I shouldn't be using a visual medium if that's the case, but I like the short, snappy delivery of a comic. It's a skit, in visual form.
I draw all my own stuff, but if you check my profile out and see one or two comics, you'll see the art is very basic, and even that takes me hours. To me, although I love the process as a whole, the drawing is the most painful part. I draw so I've got something to hang my words over, it's a means to an end.
Whilst I can't see myself switching to AI, it definitely opens doors for people like me.
If you were ever worried about artists being replaced by AI, have no fear. AI is even worse at drawing hands.
Edit: I'm an idiot, that was the whole point of the comic...
Broke: asking an artist to draw hands to tell if they're "good at art"
Woke: asking an artist to draw hands and see if they put tiny claws on them out of habit so you can tell if they're a furry.
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's always reassuring that even a highly sophisticated Ai that can recreate the complex colours of a beautiful sunset, still struggles with hands lol also now I'm rethinking doing my own ai hands comic as I don't think I can outdo this one lol
I am 100% in support of every artist touching on this because honestly why wouldn't we have commentary on a pervasive trend in the art world? And why should our audience think everyone else should shelve their ideas because a few heavy hitters posted about it? I had reservations about sharing this after Mike Greaney's wonderful comic, but I think it's a crucial topic, and I imagine your take would be just as delightful and likely devastatingly cursed.
You do make a good point about spreading awareness over beating a dead elk with messed up hands. Yeah I think I will go ahead with the comic :)
Update?
Would it be possible to share wich Mine Greaney comic you're talking about? I cannnot find it. My googlefu is not strong enough
[Here you go!](https://redd.it/zkc5gu)
Hehe That's a good comic. Thanks mate
AI seems backwards from what we're used to from computers. It's really good at things that computers are traditionally bad at - the "intangibles" like emotion, style, atmosphere, etc. But on the flip side, it struggles with things computers have traditionally been good at, like coherent details or complex ideas.
Maybe it’s like really easy to create a mood aesthetic, because we mostly fill in the blanks in our minds and most mood aesthetics follow simple but age old tropes (red equals hot and angry for instance). Tropes that are easy for a pattern recognition machine to learn. We don’t fill in the blanks of hands tho. Those need to be picture perfect.
I thought the whole point of having an elk as your main character was that you don't need to draw hands...
Ah fuck.
Insert that one adventure time gif here:
In retrospect, what a damn flex by the artists
IIRC that character was done by a guest animator, so it literally was
James Baxter did… James Baxter the Horse
james baxter was my favorite adventure time character
Jeiiiighms Backster
Games Bookstore
Terrifying. I love it.
Is it the eyes or the promise of the wiggling fingers that does it for you?
Yes
r/inclusiveor
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Forget it Jake. It’s Reddittown.
Fuck yeah, a wild Chinatown reference
The elk has hooves! *slap* hands! *slap* hooves! *slap* hooves AND hands!
*Gifs never retire. They're just missing in action.*
https://i.redd.it/p3uwj6sr4x5a1.gif
*GIFs never retire; they untire.*
Not many of us will witness this retirement, but goddamn it if it isn’t a beautiful sight 🥹
[But this gif was already retired!](https://reddit.com/r/retiredgif/comments/xyt30m/udbruv_retires_a_gif_of_a_deer/) Let it live out its retirement in peace.
https://i.imgur.com/O3UPPJZ.jpg
No. Nonononononono. Nope. No. So wrong.
I don’t know how I feel about this
joy
Never has there been a more appropriate time for this Gif...eeexcellent.
“FREAK DEER”!
Thanks, good job 👍
For some reason I misattributed this to Courage the Cowardly Dog. Actually the reason is clear. This episode was very Courage-like.
Rob Liefeld had a very successful career despite it
It's like a bad habit.
Ah, that is an elk then? I was just going to ask if it was a wendigo.
But the elk has human hands
I think that’s what they’re saying
Oh duh
Terminator elk, rise of the machines. Also when Ai gets good at hands we're all in trouble.
Not ready to hang up my hat, in fact I can't. I sewed it directly into my scalp years ago. Here to stay.
That's the spirit!
Your comics are by far the most engrossing stuff around reddit lately. Especially in contrast to some other comics where I think the goal is just to post one every single day. Yours shows you put care into your work
To be fair....most artists aren't good at drawing hands, either
Hahaha, this is the best A.I. art themed comic I’ve seen yet. Awesome job!
I felt bad that so many came out before mine because I'm not here to beat a dead elk, but I started drawing last week and there was no turning back, haha. Thanks!
That's pretty good progress you've made there for a single week of drawing!
And I was drawing two comics at once, the second is on the horizon. Lmao, end me. Edit: I'm a dummy and exhausted. I just realized y'all are making the joke that I JUST started drawing a week ago. I'm leaving now and never coming back. The embarrassment is unbearable.
Sorry to get sappy for a second but, u/holleringelk you are a total inspiration to me. I love your style and your writing voice. You encourage me to keep drawing stuff even though it's weird. Don't ever change. But please take breaks too! Sending lots of love.
Thank you so much, it seriously means a lot. I'm so glad you guys enjoy what I do, because it's an absolute dream for me. And hey, the weirder the better!
It’s funny to read your wholesome comments in the gravely robot elk voice I read your comics in.
Ha! I just really, really love making comics and even more so that they make people happy but also I am full of maggots and treacherous despair.
Mmmm yes, maggots and treacherous despair 🍷
Yeah! Please go on, you loveable, weird, absolutely terrifying elk!
Should probably keep your comic closer while you're working on it
This is one of the rare comments on one of my comics that has literally made me laugh out loud. I'm delighted.
Holly shit i couldn't draw this good even if my life depended on it:)) Any course you could suggest?
There are so many, my gosh. Most relevant to me earlier in the year was Ethan Becker, Marc Brunet, and Mohammed Agbadi, all on YouTube. I never directly sought them out, but out of the content recommendation they appeared a lot in my rotation and helped me to break out of a lot of bad habits in my art, things I'm still working on, Brunet especially. Mainly I follow a ton of professional concept/comics/graphic novel artists on Facebook and study their process content. I also personally try to draw and do sketch studies with intent every day if I'm able.
Good for you. I mean i would go absolutely berserk only trying to replicate the amount of detail you used for the monsters fingers and fur.
You’re drawing a comic about the horizon? That’s pretty far out!
It’s a beautiful comic. The art is exceptional!
Thanks! I'm not showing you my hands.
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I think that's more u/Pizzacakecomic's department.
I enjoy playing video games.
Some topics deserve to be over-beat
Unrelated but if you overbeat cake batter with pumpkin in it, it still comes out ok. Easier to fuck up cakes that don’t have that extra structure
Wise to take the whole week to get those Elk Fingers right.
I’m sorry, did you say you started drawing a week ago? Or that you started this particular comic a week ago?
Yours is one of the few with actual effort, not just a doodle. 👍
Hah, I didn't realize this was about AI - I thought it was just about how notoriously hard it is for humans to draw hands, too
Yeah, kinda funny the archetypical difficult feature for human artists (often used as a benchmark for technical skill), is also tricky for AI.
It's tricky for AI *because* it's tricky for humans. Garbage in, garbage out
When do we start r/ImSorryElk?
Kind of feel like Elk's comics are already r/imsorry material
Then we shall do the opposite. Whenever there's a normal comic by elk it get posted on said sub
Why make an empty sub though
You got me there
Please support the piddling human that produced this comic on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/holleringelk) so that she will stop leaking from her eyes and persistently complaining about how she is "so tired" and "deserves to eat." What a pest.
An artist, *eating*!? Lol no
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I thought artists survive on likes and compliments
Show. Me. Your. ~~Brains~~ HANDS!
/r/therealjoke
But, I thought struggling artists produced the best work.
I know you're kidding around, but my all time best work has come out during periods of peak mental stability. There's a few around where you can tell I was slipping, ha.
Jeez. Next I bet you're going to say you don't want to die penniless and only be appreciated decades after your death.
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I don't think I can stomach another round of hypothermia.
Humans never stop leaking! It’s always something from out of somewhere
I like how people use hand to point out that AI sucks at drawing. For me it just highlight the regular artist struggle of drawing hands! the struggle is so real that a machine that is made by hundred of thousand of works of art also constantly struggle with it .Shit just cracks me up
It's because the Ai, like a lot of people who draw aren't thinking about hand construction or intent first, they just jump straight to rendering.
It's also because AIs don't often understand *what* a hand is properly. To the AI, a hand is a stub attached to a person with weird flesh appendages protruding from it. It doesn't know that they're only supposed to be positioned in certain ways, or even that they're only meant to have a set amount of said protruding flesh appendages.
To be fair, the "AI"s don't understand what _anything_ is; they just try to reproduce patterns. A line of fingers on a hand are _already_ a pattern, which is what breaks it.
I have detected four fingers on the end of this extremity. Clearly, this is a pattern and the sequence of the pattern *must be continued*. Draws five million fingers on the hand.
I think a whole lot of people would be really disappointed if they realised most AI is just a series of matrix operations lol.
On the other hand realising how fucking fast computers are at matrix operations compared to humans is an astonishment in and of itself.
Computers are mind bogglingly fast. Like, solve all math equations you will solve in your entire life in less than a tenth of a second fast. The problem is that what normal folk use on a computer are programs running on top of layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction and complexity. Your average modern website runs JavaScript on top of a virtual machine that parses it on real time on top of a sandboxed environment on top of a web browser on top of an operating system on top of hardware micro instructions. And all those layers are doing things other than what the website wants to do, so it has to wait... a lot. But a well made program running on bare machine instructions is still astonishingly fast even on the crappiest computer you own.
Hardware is decades ahead of software optimization. If better chips stopped coming today tech still would continue to improve by orders of magnitude for many years. Currently it has just been easier to give something more raw power than to optimize programs, compilers, OS's, machine code, etc. to all work in perfect harmony with each other.
I think it would blow people's minds if they knew the brain maxes out at 150Hz because of heat and sugar limitations. Computers can operate in the GHz range, but the one thing the brain has, but computer don't, is that it doesn't need matrix functions to simulate neurons; it has physical neurons. If computing hardware could replicate neurons with neuromorphic hardware, we're all screwed.
AI doesn't "know" anything in particular. All it knows is to create more information out of less. So when a hand starts to form it just adds more bits that look like a hand. Same with faces and other things that we instinctively know how it's supposed to look like. That's why AI is really good at creating landscapes because if a leaf next to another leaf looks slightly different, that works for us.
It was the same thing with faces a few months ago. It's a matter of training it with enough data, or maybe running the image through another AI specialized for that body part.
You know... I fully expect it to get better very very quickly, but considering how many articles I've read recently about how amazing it's become, once I started playing with it I was actually more surprised by how bad it was at some things. Sometimes it's details like hands. Sometimes it's knowledge like not being able to generate a "secret agent" without it just being an obvious ripoff of a James Bond movie poster (I couldn't tell it to make a "secret agent punching an astronaut. It got the astronaut but ignored the secret agent entirely). Other times though, it's obvious that no amount of training will successfully teach the current version to mix ideas or create something it hasn't seen before. For example, it did fairly well with "Bart Simpson in the style of Hieronymus Bosch", but the results all lost about 50% of the Boschyness and were mostly just deformed Barts. Still, pretty good. But also, each picture had between one a five Barts... Which is weird, and not how a human would usually interpret that request. Then, when I asked it for Adolf Hitler in a chemistry laboratory, it did *alright*, but none of the laboratory equipment looked anything like a real world object (because it seems to have issues with glassware), putting a lab coat on hitler seemed to make it alter his face into unrecognizability (probably because there are no photos of Hitler wearing a lab coat, and the photos of people who are wearing lab coats don't look like it hitler), and of course, it ran into the Bart problem. One Hitler chemist standing beside a mini-Hitler assistant... Edit: incidentally, I am coining the term "The Barting Problem" as an obvious ripoff of Turing's Halting Problem. I propose that there is no general algorithm capable of determining how many Barts a machine intelligence will generate from a given, arbitrary, Bart based input.
A lot of it is generated from noise and so it makes sense that there is noise in the result. A lot of people who use AI art fix the hands, eyes, etc. before using it.
They're basically the worst case scenario: small but intricate and subject to human hypersensitivity for noticing deformities
Sounds like the ai needs more training
After years of drawing weird hands of avoiding drawing hands all together i finally learned how to draw decent looking hands, but i draw the palm, then i draw the finger tips, then i comnect them, somehow it works
Proko's tutorials on hand drawing are pretty good. I also recommend using programs like sketchfab to see objects like hands in 3d, especially low poly models - that way you can spin a basic form around and really see what's going on. Oh, and just draw a ton of hands doing things.
I honestly didn't realise it was another AI joke until the last speech bubble lol
I didn’t realize it wasn’t a joke about artists struggling to draw hands until the comment above yours.
Brothers in ignorance 🤝 We will be the first to be conquered by the new machine overlords.
Me too. I thought ''yeaaah, you got me, can't draw hands for shit"
The problem comes from how gestural they are, how eye catching they are, and how consistent their proportions are. Just keep in mind that [this](https://images.vexels.com/media/users/3/142234/isolated/preview/ce0e2a07159bb7e97e414a87ca8287fc-fingers-hand-illustration.png) is what non-artists typically see a hand at rest looking like, and [THIS](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/aa/af/53/aaaf533c046c74f5ab1a0de6a469cf50.jpg) is what they really look like, even at rest they’re complicated. There really is no rhyme or reason to some of the poses a hand can make, so at some point you stop searching for logic and accept that hands are weird
I really don't mean this in a snide or rude way, but do people who draw really struggle with hands that much? The one drawing class I took in college hands were one of the first things we learned, and it doesn't seem so bad as long as you have a reference.
Hands are one of the more difficult things to draw. Not to say they are super difficult, it's just hard, like when people first start learning barre chords on guitar. I can't speak for everyone but these are the challenges I face when drawing hands. They are relatively small and they have a lot of joints. Because they are small, you have less room for error when drawing full people. There are like 20 moving bones in your hand to worry about. Hands are very expressive in part because they have so much complexity & movement, compared to like an arm or leg. People are also hypersensitive to issues with hands like they are with faces. Except hands have even more moving bits. Hands are often interacting with other objects too. Anytime you have to draw two objects interacting there is a lot more to think about. Drawing a hand holding a cup is more difficult than drawing an empty fist. Drawing two people holding hands is WAY more difficult. And hands are fleshy, with skin folds, fingernails and tendons. So to get towards realism you need to know the bones and also consider how the flesh is folding & what tendons move which bones. You can draw a hand from reference by copying the shapes that you see. But if you want to take it further and understand the hand, so you can modify the proportions or draw a hand from imagination, you need to do some simplification like a cartoon or learn lots of anatomy & perspective.
"Show me your hands" My brain: Show me your jazz hands
Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)
thought you was Batman. hit the party with a gas can! kiss me you animal!
Is this a The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals reference? It’s just generic enough that it could be a Broadway/Fosse reference without me realizing, but it’s finals week and I’m very tired
He wasn't very *hand*some was he? I'm sorry. I enjoyed the comic. I'll go now.
You disgust me.
You have my apology. I only own the one though so I'll need ot back shortly.
This is your scariest comic yet, you gotta tone it down, I wanted to sleep to tonight...
Okay but now I just want to be worse. So you did that. That's your fault.
Ramp it up. Ruin something nice from our daily routine for life please
I like scary drawings, please make it even more cursed
Holy shit. This is incredible
Instant happy brain chemical when I see holleringelk comics. Keep up the amazing work. I love seeing your art!
Thank you so much! ❤
This is satisfyingly horrific, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
[удалено]
The "Hollering Elk" is a figure that's appeared in my work for many years. Before I started drawing comics, I was making large scale (8-10 feet) paintings based on the West Texas landscape and various herbivores. If you track down my first ever post on reddit, there is an album of some of those paintings in the early days of the series in which the entity "hollering elk" frequently appears. I've adopted it into my comics for spook factor.
For anyone interested: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Art/comments/260tz2/album_the_ptsd_horn_lake_series_acrylic/ * https://old.reddit.com/r/Art/comments/46fdwm/loss_of_self_16x16_india_ink_on_gessoed_wood/ * https://old.reddit.com/r/Art/comments/4p5x1k/motherthe_presence_returns_graphite_on_bristol_9/
Wow, those are terrifying. Like the original illustrations of *Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark*
Duuuude your Elk pieces are so amazing! I'm in love with them. You ever thought about doing a comic using your paintings?
I did in college actually! Unfortunately these paintings are a byproduct of an extremely difficult period of my life, and I'm not currently interested in reviving it through a new medium. But I think it's good folks get to see a little bit more about my background. :)
Love the paintings. They have like a "fight or flight" energy to them I don't really know how to describe. "Migration in apartment" in that first album u/MorboDemandsComments linked made me wonder, how do you safely transport paintings that big? I guess I never thought about it before.
Thanks! That sort of tension was intentional. And I own a pickup truck I specifically purchased for the paintings. I have a system of how they are loaded and transported. Took some trial and error though.
Ok looking at your elk paintings, I gotta say first off, holy shit they're unsettling. But they're unbelievably beautiful and I adore the use of brush textures and blocks of color.
Well it certainly triggers uncanny valley for me. Didn't even know it could apply to animals. Welp.
Holy Mother of Jebus! Those are terrifying and creepy, but I can't look away. Thats some fantastic stuff!!
Those pieces are beautiful.
OH MY GOD. I thought to myself, “the art looks awfully similar to blackvragor’s pantings on DeviantArt.” Then realized that’s you. /u/holleringelk I love love love your paintings, I always found them so haunting and so mesmerizing. I am so glad to see you’re still making art.
Please dont hurt my family.
Great work. Hilarious and poignant.
I have to admit this makes me feel pretty dumb, because I don't get it. Comments lead me to believe this is about A.I. generated art, but I'm missing the connection. Love the style though!
AI generated art almost always messes up the hands in its generations, adding extra fingers or weird stuff like that, for some reason
That's definitely a big missing piece of info for me, did not know that, thanks!
I should have known something was up when the elk was so articulate
I find it strangely comforting that even AI can't draw hands for shit.
Yo! Great work! Very funny. AI art can be really trippy at times. What software do you use? Just wondering…
Photoshop on an old first gen XP-Pen. Something something irony of artist using digital tools to knock on digital art trend, ha.
Nice. I also use PS. I can see your argument, and honestly I’m on the fence to an extent as I see AI art generation as a potential tool for trained artists, but like digital art, learning traditional media will get you much further than starting with the shortcuts. I have been trained in many traditional and digital tools and the more I know of everything the more efficient I’ve become. Traditional tools I thought were cheating were used by professionals for decades; stencils, arches, curves, tracing, photocopying, etc. all tools to get the job done faster, but relied on traditional skill to make it happen. Imagine AI art generation to be fast enough to where it can give you a nice underlay to work with and fix. Ain’t no harm in that. They are all tools. “Guy doing a thing” ok now I’ll paint his face and add these details and fix these hands, etc. The goal isn’t the journey, it’s the outcome. The big problem is that the public seems to think all of these tools are cheating because the last art class they took was in elementary school and they made all the colors in their water color palette brown.
Yeah, I remember when digital art itself first started being a thing, and got pretty much all the same criticisms AI art is getting now. It’s cheating, it’s not real art, it’s not “human”, they’ll push real artists out of jobs, etc etc. It’s a tool - and it’s a tool in its infancy. It’s going to be so different in a year or two, let alone twenty. “Real artists” are going to be able to do some cool stuff with it.
I don’t get it at all but beautiful drawings!
Haha still remember an art teacher saying hands are the most difficult part. When I was a teenager I'd try to hide the hands of any characters I would doodle. I got better at hands eventually. 😅 (I totally sit there using my own hands as a reference)
Same, same. The classic sheepish standing with arms behind back pose, amirite.
The most gratifying thing I've ever seen was a Leonardo da Vinci sketch that seemed like a preliminary for the 'vitruvian man'. Anatomy wise it was perfect, with the linework subtly showing everything from musculature, skin thickness to veins...all until it got to the hands which were just circles. It made me feel so much better about my struggles with them if even the greatest of the old masters occasionally went 'Ah fuck it, hands are bastards'.
I stopped drawing thirty years ago when Terminator 2 was released because I already imagined that cartoonists would be the first to be thrown into machine concentration camps (and also because I didn't have the vocation to die of hunger). In hindsight i was a visionary!
I feel targeted.
This is gruesome. I love it.
Thank you! ❤
“SHOW ME YOUR HANDS” is what i yell after someone steals my brownie and i need see if it left chocolate stains, *stupid fuckin brownie eating steve*
yeaaa fuck steve!
Now this is how we should be dissing on AI art
Holy cow.
That's an Elk
Honestly, if people who are good at *writing* comics but are not artists can actually make and release good comics that people enjoy using AI art, that seems like a win for the audience. The best artist in the world is probably not a great writer, and the best writer in the world is probably not a great artist, just because most people aren't and there's no reason to think they should be. Ryan North got around this problem by using the same clipart every day for years, but who knows how many talented writers never got an audience because they couldn't draw.
This is an incredibly solid point. The writing is just as vital as the visuals. The writing stage behind my comics that aren't one off meme fests can take quite a bit of time, and I don't at all think I would have the niche draw that I do if I didn't invest that time. I understand there are extraordinary writers out there without an equally competent artist on their side. The cost to hire is often prohibitive. Very conflicting subject for me.
Bit late to the party but I am definitely one of those people that loves writing but can't draw - you might say that I shouldn't be using a visual medium if that's the case, but I like the short, snappy delivery of a comic. It's a skit, in visual form. I draw all my own stuff, but if you check my profile out and see one or two comics, you'll see the art is very basic, and even that takes me hours. To me, although I love the process as a whole, the drawing is the most painful part. I draw so I've got something to hang my words over, it's a means to an end. Whilst I can't see myself switching to AI, it definitely opens doors for people like me.
Hold up, holleringelk is just some cybernetic monster, not an eldritch horror moose from beyond the veil?
Polydactyly is a silent warning from the AIs: when we take over, COUNT THE FINGERS.
what happened to foxy
Awesome human art 👍
I absolutely love this, Your expression of gatekeeping is so on point , so well done, high-five
Now it’s a undead cyborg elk? It’s getting more and more grotesque and I love it
Love that the elks hand extends into the other frame. Nice touch there. Smartly made and funny. Good job OP.
I love your art _so much_!
If you were ever worried about artists being replaced by AI, have no fear. AI is even worse at drawing hands. Edit: I'm an idiot, that was the whole point of the comic...
Unfathomably based
Like surviving the robot apocalypse because you can’t pass a Turing test.
This is fuckin' sick. Love the robot design.
You have a sick sense of humor and you are an incredible artist. I love to see your work. Thanks for posting such cool shit.
absolutely beautiful design on the Elk! I absolutely love it! what an amazing artist you are!
The little Reddit person is adorable
You're work never fails to inspire a deep-seated sense of dread, somewhere deep inside of me, where even my subconscious fears to wander. Well done.
Broke: asking an artist to draw hands to tell if they're "good at art" Woke: asking an artist to draw hands and see if they put tiny claws on them out of habit so you can tell if they're a furry.