If you’ve noticed the shamanic Art peppered throughout this site, I’d like to tell you how it came to be. The base image of each piece is created by the craiyon AI, which is based on the DALL-E ai. What is generated by entering a special set of keywords is a very small and very low-res jpeg image.
Once that image is resized by running it through a series of various filters, a hi-res “oil-painted” image is produced. What results is a fantastic expression of the Universe. Striking images of spirits, haunting portraits of shamans past and future, and stunning background images.
I did not create these works all on my own, but I did have to discover the secret sauce mix of keywords and filters to create these remarkable paintings.
Over the past decade, my shamanic initiating and subsequent awakening has been open to public scrutiny, for better or worse. As a result, I’ve received lots of support from the other side. Exposing what usually happens behind closed doors has a price.
The benefit of putting it all out there on the internet is that my ego was eviscerated. Who I thought I was got exposed and swiftly placed up on funeral pyre made of discontinued cable modems. And about 3 years ago I went silent to endure some more trials which manifested as a bizarre health issue for which there was no apparent physical cause.
The suffering, intense as it was, had much to teach. And all creative work was put on the back burner as I went through this weird and confusing illness. Being in chronic pain made it difficult to focus on anything. And about six months ago, the spirits informed me that it was time to get back to work.
So I began working on a podcast and going through old notes, sketches and draft oracle decks that had been half-created. One of the barriers to creating Oracle decks was that of getting the artwork done. Some of these decks were wild with amazing premises. And the only thing that was holding up production was finding an artist to draw, paint or create the artwork for each card.
While I have a teensy bit of artistic ability, there was no way I could create 72 original works for one deck and other decks ranges in the number of cards from 17 to 444.
I had seen AI-Generated art on the internet and had viewed the low-res images. The technology is still in it’s infancy and not really up to snuff in creating the types of images I desired. Playing around with DALL-E brought some amusing and weird results. But nothing jaw-dropping. The keywords we’re limited and even then the images were painfully small . There’s not much you can do with a 256 x 256 pixel images
Then one day, during my daily cold shower in fact, inspiration struck me. Perhaps I could use the DALL-E AI to create shamanic images. The first results were encouraging enough and I experimented with different styles. And I soon got into the groove creating images of all sorts of shamanic things. It was clear that the Universe was manifesting these images for these decks. But there was still more work to do.
The process of resizing and enlarging the details of the “paintings” is somewhat tedious but it’s worth the extra effort. Collaboration with an AI was not something I initially wanted to do, but after seeing how quickly and how deftly the AI creates original works of art, I can’t deny that this is the way these images needed to be. The AI creates the “sketch” and then I flesh out the basic idea.
For now, I’ve made available the first 33 of these works. They are used as featured images for each page or post. It is my hope that these images are appreciated for what they are. Definitely I can feel the spirits behind these images and their delight that they’ve found a way to paint from the other side.
Enjoy,
Patrick
