Creative

A “weird abomination” (yes, AI-related): Pickles and Cat

I am one of those who believes we are in a big ol’ AI bubble and that bubble is going to burst and leave a big mess that will probably leave tech CEOs unscathed, but result in more mass layoffs of workers. Such is our society as of now.

I understand and agree with those who object to AI companies hoovering up data without permission, then repackaging it in dubious and energy-sucking ways. Generally, AI is bad, and its positives are small. For me, it has been a silly diversion when I indulge in it, which is not often. For example, I have a NightCafe account (an AI image generation site) with over 3,000 unsued credits. You get 5 free credits per day. So yeah.

But I occasionally indulge and one of my interweb friends shared some silly songs he’d made using Suno. It was mildly amusing, but then he mentioned you can write your own lyrics, so I had to try it.

I brainstormed for several minutes (quite literally) and wrote a song called “Pickles and Cat.” I told Suno to make the song country and upbeat. It generated two versions. This is the first and “best” (IMO) and is likely the closest I’ll ever come to writing and performing music. I’m good with that. Garage Band is hard.

(I made the artwork in Canva, it was a labour of love.)

Pickles and Cat

I like my pickles and I like my cat
My cat likes pickles, well, how about that?

I put my pickles in jars
And I send 'em to Mars

Now the Martians have my pickles
Nothing else rhymes with pickles

And the Martians they ate them all up
I sent my cat but they wanted a pup
I told them no sir, I can't do that
Then they said OK, send the cat

Pickles and cat, my two favorite things
Green and orange, they make my bells ring

Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some
But not mine, I'm not sharing none

When my cat got to Mars he scratched a couch
It was a Martian, and the Martian yelled ouch

My cat ran away to a big rocket ship
Pressed all the buttons and went on a trip

Landed on a big space rock and scratched up the place
Now no one goes there, it's his own private space

Pickles and cat, my two favorite things
Green and orange, they make my bells ring

Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some
But not mine, I'm not sharing none

And for the completist, here’s the direct Suno link: Pickles and Cat by @interstellaralbums985 | Suno

I will draw a bird soon

This is me promising on the internet to do something. Maybe not today, but soon, as defined as “in the next couple of days.” In the meantime, to help inspire me, my bird art of a Sandhill crane:

Sandhill crane being very Sandhill crane

I need a fancy new logo

With the site redesign mostly complete, I think I need a new logo, something that isn’t just literally the name of the site. Yes, I know it’s clean and efficient, but it’s also sterile and blah.

I still want something sleek and uncluttered. I will ponder.

When I tinkered around in Canva, I ended up with this:

It both does and doesn’t speak to me. It’s also full of hidden meaning that no one else would ever figure out.

But the actual logo will probably not feature a jar of pickles.

The updated HD version of Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards, Episode 1 (2024)

I finally finished going through Episode 1 of Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards, reworking the comic to make it more palatable in the age of high-resolution monitors. I tried not to George Lucas it up by drastically changing the artwork and making this a Special Edition™, focusing more on preserving the original art, just making it smoother and more refined.

You can view the updated episode in the gallery below or on the AC vs. QB page linked above.

Issues with the HD version of Episode 1:

  • Continuity: The QBs are Blood Eagle (red), but in several panels the tower is shown as also being red, meaning under QB control, despite it being claimed by Angry Carrot. Whoops!
  • The line thickness on AC and minions varies a bit from panel to panel. I went back and redid a few, but the rest I declare just part of the charm.
  • The word balloons and text are sometimes a bit too big/spacious. This was a result of changing the font from Verdana to Back Issue BB, which have very different properties. In a few cases, I manually chopped down the size of the balloon and had to paint over the old balloon underneath to keep it from rudely poking through.
  • I dropped the outline on the balloons as it was too much work to easily replicate.
  • I adjusted the brightness of the shots to try to make them as even as possible, but a few are still too dark or too bright. Again, part of the charm!

On the plus side, the improvements:

  • Panels are now 1920×1440 instead of a tiny 640×480.
  • Redrawn Angry Carrot and minions have much more refined line work than the originals, with far fewer jaggies.
  • I forgot to give Angry Carrot arms in a few panels where he clearly should have had arms. This has been corrected.
  • The Back Issue BB font gives the episode more of a comic book look (this is a matter of taste, but I’m including it here).
  • I redid the first panel to make it match all other episodes, tweaking the fonts where necessary.

How I redid the episode:

  • I started by using Pixelmator Pro’s Super Resolution feature to preserve detail while increasing the images from 640×480 to 1920×1440.
  • Every panel featuring Angry Carrot and/or minions was brought into Procreate, where I retraced and recoloured over the original art. These were then exported as Photoshop (PSD) files to preserve layers.
  • I loaded all the upscaled art into Affinity Photo, then redid the text and word balloons, and made other minor tweaks to colours and other bits.
  • I saved these as Affinity Photo files to preserve the layers.
  • All panels were then batch exported as PNG, WEBP and JPG files. Although the WEBP files were smallest, they subtly toned down the colours of Angry Carrot in a way I didn’t like, so I went with the JPG versions.

Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards, Episode 6.5 redone!

Yes, this is a weird choice for updating the comic, a brief “Where are they now?” update I slapped together while I pondered where to take the comic (nowhere, ultimately!)

I got the idea to redo the strip because the original panels (as mentioned previously) are absurdly tiny on a typical widescreen monitor, at a mere 375 x 281 pixels.

It was a fun little experiment to modernize the comic, as I had to redo some of it from scratch and probably redid some of the panels significantly faster than originally when I handcrafted them from the chunky pixels and stone tools of 2002.

Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards page to see the new and original versions of the episode.

The higher resolution gallery:

Notes on what I changed:

Globally:

- All panels increased to 1920x1440 resolution
- Main font changed from Verdana to Back Issues BB for a more comic book look
- Revised characters were drawn in Procreate on an iPad Pro
- Revised artwork, text and dialog balloons were added in Affinity Photo

Individually:

1. Completely redone.
2. Used screenshot taken from Diablo II: Resurrected.
3. Resized the dialog balloon to make it smaller. Painted over the old balloon, then copied and pasted parts of the background to better blend everything in. I was helped here by how crude and low resolution a blown-up image from Jedi Knight (1997) looks in 2024.
4. Found new still life for background, made the pepper look less still, more peppery, since that seemed a likely reason for him being fired. A “still” version of the pepper also exists in a hidden layer in the original Procreate sketch.
5. New background, new lighting effect added in Affinity Photo. Celery characters were traced over from the originals. Evil version has a tweaked goatee.
6. Changed GIANT Chinese Egg Attack!! to the less culturally insensitive GIANT Evil Egg Attack!! Redid the eggs to look angry/evil. Open mouths reveal yolk-filled innards.
7. Completely redone with new colour image of Freud (same pose) and new background.
8. Completely redone.
9. Completely redone.
10. Completely redone. Figures were traced from originals and refined a bit.
11. Completely redone.

I am planing to at least take another look at the high-resolution version of Episode 1 I also did recently, to see if I want to tweak that one (and maybe others) as well.

Everything old is new again

In another case of nostalgia gone horribly weird, I’ve started perusing the old Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comics I did a quarter of a century ago and realized that the images are super tiny because back in 2000 everyone still had 15-inch monitors. Observe a random panel from Episode 6.5:

Squint to see the filly.

This shot is shown at its full resolution–a whopping 375×281 pixels. It’s like a Diablo II postage stamp.

I decided to super-size all the images to 1920×1440 using the Super Resolution™ feature in Pixelmator Pro for the main comic panels (which are 640×480, so large postage stamps) and it worked surprisingly well, even preserving the text balloons decently. But some have required more fiddling and none of these panels were made with fancy layer technology, so it’s a bit like fixing up an old painting–you need to be careful to not muck it up.

This is mucking it up.

What I have found is in some cases I need to actually redo pretty much the entire panel. For example, here’s the Diablo II panel above in its shiny new 2024 version:

Even shrunken down for the post, it’s still four times bigger than the original.

Upscaling the original panel looked grossbuckets. The shot above is from Diablo II Resurrected, which offers much better graphics than the original, though I could have toggled on the original 2000 era graphics for maximum fidelity, but that many giant pixels would look very chunky at 1920×1440. I also changed the font to one more befitting a comic. This means I have to change the font in every panel now. Whoops.

And while it’s a bit silly to go back and do all this work for something very few people will see, I’m enjoying it, and it’s fun to revisit the old comics and make them a little more presentable for our shiny modern age.

Bird art: Cedar waxwing

I finally got to drawing one of these pretty boys, based on a photo I took on July 8, 2023 at Tlahutum Regional Park.

If I touched it up, I’d probably adjust the background colours and spend a little more time on the branch. But it’s fine-ish.

A short time later, this alternate (updated?) version:

Or maybe the original green with the updated blue? I’m going to bed now. 😛

A sort-of new Gum Gum Person drawing

Back in Inktober 2019 I drew this sketch for the prompt TREASURE:

Recently, and randomly, I decided to colour it (maybe I just like colouring books) and, as I’ve done before with other GGP sketches, ended up refining it at the same time. The lines of the chest are straight now, but if you look closely1Maybe not even that closely, really you can see the chest is not quite straight. But I kind of like it that way. Also, I admit to largely giving up on the coins. Maybe in the next revision.

Both drawings done in Procreate on my iPad Pro.

I drew a thing last night

It’s incomplete and may never be finished, so I’m not posting it, but I was inspired to finally doodle something after being inspired by Chris Silverman, who makes drawings in Apple Notes, which is just as weird as it sounds. He also draws weird things, which I love.

You can see his work at notes art.

I did not use Apple Notes, I used Procreate on my iPad Pro, but I mimicked the look and feel by using the same 3″ x 5″ canvas and using a combo of pencil and charcoal brushes. It was fun, and I’ll be doing more, which I will actually post. I’ll also mix things up as I progress, so the work becomes less homage and more my own. (I drew a night scene showing a cliffside beach against a gray and foreboding sky.)

Here’s a piece of one of Chris’s recent drawings to give a taste. I highly recommend visiting the site, checking out his work and his process.