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In support of pencils
a year ago
I remember when, as a kid, I used to hold a pencil a lot. Give me a pencil, and I would come-up with the most ridiculous stuff that only the hyper imagination of my child self could muster then. It's how my artistic abilities developed over the years. Pencils are a nice tool for budding artists to master their craft with. They have an advantage over pens and brushes: the ability to erase mistakes. This property also makes them perfect for professional artists to plan out the layout and composition of their paintings beforehand. Some artists even produce entire artworks via the pencil alone.
These days, I hardly hold the pencil as frequently as I used to, mostly because I draw exclusively digitally now. Still, never underestimate the power of the Pencil tool in a given art program like Clip Studio Paint. While you'll never see it in the final completed artwork, the Pencil tool is still a very invaluable tool for artists to ensure that all the layout and character proportions will always be correct. The Pencil tool also has other bigger advantages compared to the traditional physical pencil: you can drag, resize and rotate parts of the sketch drawn via the Pencil tool, which helps to really further refine the layout and composition more.
Why am I talking about this? Well, it's because, earlier, I saw a post on Twitter (still not calling it "X") by an AI bro, who claimed that "pencil" is a slur now. They asked people to hashtag-StopAIPhobia, and encouraged people to hashtag-BreakThePencil.
As an artist, this did, in fact, affect me in an emotional level. The pencil is one of the most important inventions known to man. And now, these AI bros started asking us to destroy our pencils? How deep into madness that this world has descended into? We've already had to deal with countless deluge of AI-generated images masquerading as "art" flooding the virtual space as of late, and the rise of AI-generated videos is also a worrying prospect as it could also be used to falsify video evidence, too.
Yes, in the past, I used to claim that AI-generated images can be a nice tool for artists with severe art block to generate new ideas for them to draw with. Well, that was back when AI image generation was in its infancy, when we used to point and laugh at the hilariously bad output that these tools used to be able to generate at best. I've now since taken back those claims, because the output has gotten so good that people are now using the actual image output itself as the final art. That's already crossing the line for me, and the point where I changed my mind completely on my original statement.
So please, if you have any pencils lying around your house, protect them. Remember well on how they used to grow and nurture your artistic capabilities. If you have spent the lead of your pencil, buy a new one, and protect that, too. I can't believe how something that we used to take for granted is now something that we must now start protecting.
These days, I hardly hold the pencil as frequently as I used to, mostly because I draw exclusively digitally now. Still, never underestimate the power of the Pencil tool in a given art program like Clip Studio Paint. While you'll never see it in the final completed artwork, the Pencil tool is still a very invaluable tool for artists to ensure that all the layout and character proportions will always be correct. The Pencil tool also has other bigger advantages compared to the traditional physical pencil: you can drag, resize and rotate parts of the sketch drawn via the Pencil tool, which helps to really further refine the layout and composition more.
Why am I talking about this? Well, it's because, earlier, I saw a post on Twitter (still not calling it "X") by an AI bro, who claimed that "pencil" is a slur now. They asked people to hashtag-StopAIPhobia, and encouraged people to hashtag-BreakThePencil.
As an artist, this did, in fact, affect me in an emotional level. The pencil is one of the most important inventions known to man. And now, these AI bros started asking us to destroy our pencils? How deep into madness that this world has descended into? We've already had to deal with countless deluge of AI-generated images masquerading as "art" flooding the virtual space as of late, and the rise of AI-generated videos is also a worrying prospect as it could also be used to falsify video evidence, too.
Yes, in the past, I used to claim that AI-generated images can be a nice tool for artists with severe art block to generate new ideas for them to draw with. Well, that was back when AI image generation was in its infancy, when we used to point and laugh at the hilariously bad output that these tools used to be able to generate at best. I've now since taken back those claims, because the output has gotten so good that people are now using the actual image output itself as the final art. That's already crossing the line for me, and the point where I changed my mind completely on my original statement.
So please, if you have any pencils lying around your house, protect them. Remember well on how they used to grow and nurture your artistic capabilities. If you have spent the lead of your pencil, buy a new one, and protect that, too. I can't believe how something that we used to take for granted is now something that we must now start protecting.
The difference here is that digital art still needs to be produced manually: someone still needs to draw that picture out. So it's still a work of art, because the artist themself still consciously decides on the placement of every single element in the painting, and also determine exactly how the final output will turn out to be. You can't do that with AI-generated imagery.