Ready to enhance your creative process? Discover how to effectively use AI in your art creation and why it's a crucial tool for growth and improvement as a creative visionary.

Takeaways

• As an artist you can leverage generative AI to overcome creative blocks and find inspiration;
• AI tools give access to abilities and functions for those without the budget for specialists or skills;
• AI can enhance existing art with additional stylizations and technical improvements;
• Conceptualizing, drafting, and creating WIPs is easier with AI, cutting down the preparation time needed to create art.

Inspire your art and overcome creative blocks

Even artists with decades of experience are sometimes at a loss for ideas. Artist’s block is very common, where artists reach a temporary creative limit. No words come to mind, no ideas on where the brushstroke should go, or what final note to add to the composition to complete it. This does not mean the artist is incapable of creative work, but it is the result of an infinite number of circumstances, such as emotional exhaustion, lack of motivation, interruptions from personal matters, etc.

Generative AI has the potential to provide artists with the inspiration they need to overcome artists’ block.

Think of generative AI as a giant database for art. If you’re looking for something new, a quick use of generative AI could assist you in discovering new artwork and creative pieces that will provide you with the inspiration you need to continue working on your own stuff. It's like visiting a museum with an infinite number of paintings or reading excerpts from hundreds of authors, each with their unique voice.

Concept Art: How to Brainstorm Character Designs with AI

Here's an example of how illustrators and concept artists can use generative AI to create character concepts for inspiration.

1. Create an account on the Let's Enhance Image Generator.‌‌

2. In the designated text box, write a image generation prompt to render your desired image. ‌

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‌3. Once the image is generated, choose the ones that you like and save them to your device by clicking the arrow button.‌

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‌Pro Tip: Experiment a few times with the image generator until you get a concept image that matches the essence of your desired character. Even if you are satisfied with the initial results, it's always a good idea to give it another go in case you find a better design.‌
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Tackle artistic challenges with accessible AI tools

Democratizing 3D Art and Animation

Blender is one of the most popular 3D modeling and animation software to work with. It’s by no means the first, but in recent years, it’s gotten really popular for one very good reason: it’s accessible in more ways than one. First of all, it’s completely free. So long as you have hardware strong enough to handle it, you can download it and start sculpting or animating. Secondly, it’s accessible thanks to a user-friendly interface that is very easy to learn and use. With the release of Blender, thousands of new artists across the globe gained access to 3D sculpting and animation tools that helped them create new art and start their careers as artists.

Empowering Artists with Accessible AI

Rendering an image with Midjourney or Let's Enhance doesn’t make someone an illustrator or painter. However, the accessibility in the case of AI art is about giving artists more opportunities to make useful additions to their work.

Here’s a great example of how accessible AI tools can help artists overcome challenges in their work. A comic book illustrator may be very skilled in designing characters but is unable to draw gorgeous backgrounds. Normally they’d have two options: either take time to learn the skill themselves or commission another artist to help them. In the case of artists who are just starting out, dedicating time and money to either of these solutions may not be possible.

With the help of generative AI, this artist can easily create a background for their comic. There will always be demand for skilled background artists or artists of any kind for that matter. But for those who don’t have the privilege of learning the skill themselves or the funding to pay for a professional, generative AI is a handy alternative.

Render a Background: Create a Gorgeous Comic Background in Minutes

Let's put our example of the comic book artist to the test and generate a comic book background.

1. Log into your Let's Enhance Image Generator account.‌
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2. In the text prompt box, type in the keywords for your comic book background.‌

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‌3. After generating the images, pick the backgrounds that would suit your comic book style the most and save it to your device.‌

Pro Tip: Stylistic keywords, such as manga, comic, black and white, etc. have a major impact on the rendered image. Use these descriptors to narrow down the results of your generated background.

Enhance Your Art

We’ve been using software to enhance our work for some time now. Software that automatically applies filters to photos, adjusts lighting in videos, and enhances the quality of images has existed for quite a while. This technology has made it easier for artists to enhance their work and AI generation can help in this regard as well.

While still in early stages of development, there are AI platforms specialized in turning a static drawn image into an animated GIF. Prior to the development of such technologies, artists had to draw and animate these on their own. Now, an artist who does not possess these skills can feature additional enhancements and make their art more complex.

The same goes for lighting, adding filters, unique stylizations, and so on. This is especially useful for artists working on a very urgent project who do not have the time to do all this by hand. But with generative AI, they have more options to enhance their work in a very short amount of time.

Upscale an Image: Enlarge Images without Losing Quality

A great example of how AI can enhance art is by upscaling it. Let’s Enhance is an AI-powered platform that can upscale and increase the resolution of images without loss in quality, something that is pretty much impossible to do without the help of AI.

1. Create an account on Letsenhance.io.‌

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‌2. Click on My Images and you will arrive at the photo editing dashboard.‌

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‌3. Upload the image and tweak the options on the right-hand side to the image type and by how much you’d like the image to be upscaled.‌

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‌4. Click Start processing and once that’s done, save the image to your device. We upscaled one of the images from a prior example, which was 446 by 442 pixels to 1784 by 1768 pixels. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two images.‌

‌Pro Tip: Check out this complete guide on how to upscale your images.

Streamline the conceptualization

‌Creating art is a stage-by-stage process. Artists develop a sketch, prototype, or first draft of their work, then keep chipping away or making additions to it and create a complete piece of art. Conceptualization is a crucial part of creation as it makes the final product more complex and dynamic.

The challenge of working on concept art is that artists spend days, even weeks creating multiple iterations of a new design, only to have them be rejected. For design teams working with very strict deadlines, generative AI can help them develop tons of design iterations, present them to clients, and after one is accepted, then the artists can get to work.

This means greater results in a shorter amount of time, which benefits both artists, who now don’t need to worry as much about creating everything from scratch, and also clients, who now receive exactly what they want without having to wait for the commissioned artist to create new concepts.

Storyboarding a Film: AI Can Help Visualize Your Shots

Using the Let’s Enhance Image Generator, we tried to see how well AI could help us create a storyboard and conceptualize how a film will look before a single frame is even shot.

1. Go to letsenhance.io/ai-image-generation.‌
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‌2. Write the text prompt in the designated space. Make sure to include stylistic keywords, such as black and white, noir, wide shot, and photo. Wide shot, close-up, and over-the-shoulder are just a few examples of keywords that are very useful for brainstorming film frames. Click Generate to render the images.‌

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‌3. Once the images are rendered, hover over the images to download the one that you think fits the style of your film.‌

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‌4. What sets the Let’s Enhance Image Generator apart from others is that while it does also come with a resolution cap (512x512), you also get the option to upscale the image 4 times its original size (2048x2048) if you want the image to be bigger.‌

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Using AI, scriptwriters can visualize their film as they are writing the script, reducing the time it takes to conceptualize the storyboard.‌
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‌Pro Tip: For more information on how to render images with the Let’s Enhance Image Generator, check out this guide or the video tutorial below.

AI and Artists: Enhancing, Not Replacing

It’s important to understand that generative AI is still in its infancy and it’s far too early to tell which direction it will go, both in terms of technology and legislation. It may just be that in the near future, policies and regulations are adopted to limit the use of generative AI to ensure that human creativity is not curtailed. It’s hard to tell, but in an ever-evolving world of technology, it’s important for everyone to learn and adapt to the changing landscape of the creative field.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has taken off in the last couple of decades to the point where anyone with half-decent hardware can create their own 3D animation. But skilled 2D animators are still in high demand. AI was able to write content all the way back in the 1980s, and yet, writing is still a bustling industry. Painting and drawing art by hand did not disappear with the introduction of digital tools like Photoshop or GIMP.

AI is not here to replace artists. Instead, much like with any technological advancement, it is here to offer conveniences and make the process of creation more practical for those who prioritize efficiency over style and expression. And while there is still plenty to discuss regarding the ethical use of AI art, it’s important to acknowledge how this new technology can benefit artists and their hard work.

FAQ Regarding AI Art

Here are some questions about AI art we hear quite often and we'd like to offer our perspective on the impact this technology has on human creativity.

What is AI art?

While answering the question “What is art?” calls for a deep philosophical conversation, “AI art” is a little easier to define now that technology is widely accessible. By definition, AI art is any piece of artwork, be it written, visual, or audible, that is created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.‌

Most of today’s AI art is created using generative AI. This is when an AI model analyzes countless amounts of data and then renders new art based on these references. Users give the AI commands to render new art, which are called "input prompts". These can be images but are commonly text-based keywords that control the results of the rendering.

Obviously, we’ve significantly oversimplified this very complex field of computer science, but it’s crucial to remember that the basis of AI art is human-made art.

Why is generative AI controversial?

With the recent rise of generative AI, the hottest topic of debate has been whether or not this new technology is harming the careers of artists. It is a very controversial discussion, that has led to large communities of artists calling for the boycott of generative AI. This is understandable, considering that many fear that their career will be uprooted by technology that does their work exponentially times faster than what humans are capable of. And while the debate about the ethics of generative AI is still being waged, it’s also important to consider the more positive aspects of AI and how it helps artists.

Will AI art replace human creativity?

This is the million dollar question that’s been lingering on the minds of many artists. There are a lot takes in regards to this topic, but as a company that works with AI image rendering and enhancement, we believe that this new technology will work alongside artists rather than replace them. We see that in the future, this new technology will help artists in their creation process and while there is already a lot that AI is capable of, ultimately, the technology is dependent on ever-expanding human creativity.