Words and Pictures

“My friend and long-time cover artist has a crowdfunding campaign going for a beautiful, full-color, 100-page collection of his art. Please check it out . . .”

The Short Version

My friend and long-time cover artist

Manuel “Lolo” Guzman

has a crowdfunding campaign going for a beautiful, full-color, 100-page collection of his art. Please check it out and back here, as it is vital to support independent artists, human artists, in this age of AI-generated images and words.

From his Indiegogo page:

Hi, I’m Manuel Guzman, but you may know me as Lolo. Several years ago I held a successful crowdfunding campaign for In Search of Sacha,¹ an illustrated fantasy fairytale storybook, which I wrote and illustrated. Your reviews have been a pleasure to read and I’m so glad that ISOS held your attention and made you smile. To this day I am still so very thankful to all of you who supported the work and hope the book still brings you joy. Today I am presenting you with a new project, Lolo’s Art Book!

Lolo’s Art Book is a collection of my work from the past two decades. The book will be a large 8.5”x11” perfect bound book with 100 full color pages featuring over 150 of my works. I have selected the paintings from my body of work that would best excite and exhilarate the senses. The portfolio is mostly made up of fantasy and science fiction themed pieces, though there are some images that would be categorized differently for variety.

After doing some math, I found that a goal of $4,000 is what makes the most sense for the amount of work the project requires. 50%-60% of which will go to printing, just under 10% goes for IGG, and another 20% for packing & shipping fees. Unless some of the perks are sold, even if I make the goal, there won't be much left in profits, but I will be content to know that this book came to fruition and will be in your hands.

Go support a real one.

The Long Version

I am not going to discuss the merits or morality of using AI art, as I myself use it for several of these posts. In fact, I think Manuel’s very nuanced take says things better than I could:

It can be very disheartening when I see writers and musicians, especially folks I’ve worked with, or that are in the same spheres of social media, that use A.I. for image creation. These people are typically aware of the issue of mainstream industries being a problematic engine to society and culture. They understand that depravity is being pushed on us in all forms of entertainment and they fight back by creating works that buttresses the good in culture. However, by resorting to using such software to generate the images for their products, such as book covers and other promotional material, they are instead reducing the impact their work can have. By not dealing with human artists you might save on costs, but the price society, and the culture at large, pays is significantly greater in the long term.

Living souls respond to living art. Like the writers and the musicians, the visual artists are the children who dreamt that their input could bring delight and awe to the world. Those hopes and dreams push them through years of sweat and tears of hard practice. Those growing pains are at the heart of what make the art valuable and alive, beyond the aesthetic dimension. There is a story there. Today, the automated process by input prompts into the machine is actually a stealing the hard work of real artist and destroying those dreams.

The opportunity to build connection between persons, and for a stories to spawn that add volume to your projects, is sacrificed and wasted to punching cold and dry prompts into some software. So if you are considering using AI for your next project, reach out to some of the artists in your circles and you’ll be surprised to find that they are often willing to work something out where things are doable for everyone involved. Art should remain the domain of living souls and I agree completely with . . . [] Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli when he said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

I have been working as freelance artist for 20 years now and it’s as tough as it’s ever been. I just launched a campaign for my new project, LOLO’S ART BOOK, a collection of over 150 of my works from these past two decades. Check it out, back the project and support living art.

PS: I should say, I am not entirely against using A.I. art for inspiration and formulating ideas. I am referring to its use for the final form of a project, when it has become a product. Then, in those cases I see a missed opportunity where life didn’t happen.

I personally think AI is a tool like any other. And as with any other tool, over-reliance on it can result in the loss of certain skills, individualist or culturally. Because art is a skill and a craft as much as it is anything else, and if there’s no incentive to cultivate that skill, away it will go. We’re not talking about things like creating stone wheels or manufacturing 8-track tapes, we’re talking about art itself. Maybe that sounds farfetched to you, but it doesn’t to me.

I think art is going to be more niche, more boutique, and therefore will increasingly rely on campaigns like Manuel’s to stay alive. It will rely on patrons using their money and their good taste bolster artists who share suits or visions and culture. People like Lorenzo Medici, as

Alexandru Constantin

recently wrote about. And to borrow a term from

Brian Niemeier

, this neo-patronage will be the way.

I do want to pull the thread on something Manuel said: connection. Particularly, there is a link between the visual arts and the written word, or other media it accompanies. I think about the indelible link between, say, Frank Frazetta’s paintings and the works of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I can’t imagine Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series without Gary Ruddell’s painted covers, or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time absent the, somewhat controversial, art of the late Daryl K. Sweet. When I was younger, Larry Elmore’s Dragonlance covers were as big a part of the feel of the books as the actual words. And my favorite example, the editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings my father has with covers painted by Professor Tolkien himself.

It’s the same with music. Pink Floyd’s relationship with the design firm Hipgnosis resulted in a series of iconic covers even non-fans know as much as they do actual songs from, say, Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. How about Roger Dean’s painted covers for Yes’s albums, or the wonderful and varied designed Hugh Syme came up with during his forty-year relationship with Rush?

In my own small way, this is what I’ve tried to cultivate with Manuel. He has done the covers to four of my books, as well as interior illustrations, and has also helped me with the design and overall “production” to try and make the cohesive package I have in my head a reality. He’s even helped me with videos used in my own crowdfunding campaigns. I’m not going to get that with AI, and neither are you.

- Alexander

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Thank you for reading this essay. If you would like to read some of my fiction, please check out my books on Amazon. You can also throw a few drachmas into the tip jar at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you, and God bless.

1. In the interests of full disclosure, I edited In Search of Sacha for Manuel.