Artificially breaking these posts into groups of ten has been KILLING ME, my brain just doesn’t work that way, so going forward let’s do posts when I have time/bandwidth instead.
Art brain is gonna art brain thanks for your patience and also you’re getting stream of consciousness Jen with this post so good luck with all that 😜
Anyway!
The whole point of my 100 day project is *not overthinking* but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I love this process and making collages with images I’ve generated in Midjourney.
Like a LOT a lot. This might be my most favorite collection of weirdness ever.
The early ones were basically trash art which was fine. I talked about how I was starting to spend more time with these along the way and…I’m noticing a happy intersection of creating something I’m good at + working on something I could happily spend hours doing to the exclusion of all other things.
So I’m digging in.
And also, because I feel it’s important to show my process with all of the anti-AI sentiment out there (go ahead call my art lazy I triple dog dare ya), I’m starting to post Reels on Instagram showing the images I used and how I turned them into the final work.
Dunno how sustainable it is to keep doing Reels (I’m an artist, not an entertainer/content creator!) but if I have a little extra time I’ll sneak them in.
You’re following me on Instagram right? 👀
Digital collage wasn’t something I’d played with before this 100 day project and it’s forcing me to learn new skills not just in generating images but also in how I curate and collage them. I used to have a strong anti-digital collage bias because I felt like it was *too easy*.
It’s not easy 😂🤦♀️🤷♀️
That said the freedom of being self-taught is that I have no idea what I’m doing and anyway it doesn’t really matter. I just get to have fun.
Maybe that’s why I like making these so much.
This next one is a collaboration with Cyber Ocelot, who sent me the lovely kitteh, and Lisa McKenna, who sent me the woman “vacuuming” the floor.
It was a fun challenge to use work other people created for me! I rarely do collaborations because I always have too many projects in the works and I get panicky about not being able to hold up my end of things if work work or life gets swamped. But “hey send me something cool to play with” was the perfect speed so I may do this again.
So many of these are inspired by things people say to me or something I read or a conversation I overhear. It’s fun to have a (relatively) quick outlet to respond to life’s weirdness.
This bird collage was an accident. I started out prompting Midjourney to create an image of a sad bird and it made the image of the woman on the sofa with wings and I dug into that a little bit and ended up with all of these women and birds who clearly belonged together so…I just went with it.
Random is fun!
This next one is a collab with Mel Hearts, who sent me the adorable monster! ❤️
These next two are by far my favorites of this series.
Will never get tired of creating monsters in Midjourney. Never ever. They’re my favorite thing to work with even though I haven’t been using them much lately.
It took every ounce of willpower I have not to dig into starting a nouns of assemblage collection…for now 😂
Martha: just like the rest of us. Midjourney kind of nailed Midcentury Martha right?!?
It’s been a busy month so way less chatting about the process and also…these haven’t exactly been dailies. The important thing is that I’m being gentle with myself when I simply don’t have time to do them and also that I keep circling back. That’s the real lesson here for me because I’ve been so hard on myself in past 100 day projects. To be in a place where I can just be like *fuck it I’ll do this when I can* feels really good.
I’m in the thick of all the crazy life changes I talked about back when I first started these so they’ll probably continue to not be dailies. I can bust out three or four a week I’ll be a happy camper. Truth be told if I had unlimited time I’d be making these all day long I’m having so much fun with the process!
After mulling it over I decided I’m going to submit some of these for Art Fair 14C. I’d been planning to submit my paper collage work but I feel more connected to this collection right now. We’ll see what happens! Digital work is still underrepresented (if it’s even acknowledged) in most contemporary art spaces and the only way that changes is if artists persistently nudge things along until it’s impossible to ignore.
All the fingers and toesies crossed! 🤞
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