Yana Knight has developed a process and for using a certain suite of AI tools a creative companion – in this case for making a short comic about whatever lurks in the mind. The process is inspired by Lynda Barry’s work on making comics. The tools, built upon the Stable Diffusion and GPT-2 models, are part of a suite developed at the University of Edinburgh and is available open source on Google Colab. Yana is using a customised set of them when developing a process for how to use it for artistic work. https://storyofyana.com

Yana led me through the process a few weeks ago when we met.

I then allowed the text and images to rest for a few weeks, and yesterday, I made this 4-panel comic:

Key to the process was to make quick analog drawing exercises for warmup, and creative prompting, and then use what came out of it as seeds for creating with the tool.

It was very fun! I started with the mundane action of closing the curtains from the harsh spring sun, but ended up becoming a red bird ready to fly out the window.

The steps of the process:

Step 1: One minute blind contour drawing.

Step 2: Quick Drawing exercise

Step 3: In tree minutes, write things you did the past 24 hours

Step 4: Pick one of the things from the list of things you did.

Step 5: Draw an image of yourself doing the thing, 3 minutes. Here is my drawing:

Step 6. Take a picture of the drawing, and write a sentence of text to go with it. Feed the image and and the text to the tool. The sentence i put in was “I pulled the curtains”.

The the left in the image above is the image the system gave back to me. I thought the sun started to look like a plant.

Now commenced the part where where we went back and forth to draw, formulate texts, and feeding it into the system.

In the image below, i made notes on beige paper on what images I drew and the notes on green paper are about what the system generated in return.

I was exhilarated at the end of the session, it was the 5th of May 2024. I decided to let the images rest, and yesterday evening I selected four images and wrote some words – that is the resulting comic that is at the top of this post.

On a personal note, I found it key that Yana led me through the creative process, and that I trusted her when we did so. The actual process took less than an hour, it did not feel laborious, it was play. Yana was one friend I played with, and the system also became a friend.