Category: Art

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Diffusion Bee

Homer Simpson depicted as a muppet by Stable Diffusion AI with a floating muppet head beside him

I’ve been watching the emergence of AI image creation tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, Craiyon and Stable Diffusion and I think it’s pretty neat. But not everyone has been happy about our new AI overlords. Art communities and freelance artists have been particularly vocal about their displeasure.

As much as I see there are serious philosophical issues, in the meantime I wanted to try it out and have been delighted at the news that users of Apple silicon Macs can now access the Stable Diffusion engine on their own computers using Diffusion Bee.

Divam Gupta:

Diffusion Bee is the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. Comes with a one-click installer. No dependencies or technical knowledge needed.

  • Runs locally on your computer no data is sent to the cloud (other than request to download the weights and checking for software updates).

It works just fine on my M2 MacBook Air. I’m glad I splurged and got the 24GB of RAM. Because the results can be a bit random, I popped into Photoshop to improve the results of the above “Homer Simpson as a Muppet” prompt. (I’m not sure what the floating head beside him is all about, but I left it because it’s amazing.)

(via Daring Fireball)

Update: I’ve just discovered CHARL-E, another app that utilizes Stable Diffusion to create images on Apple silicon Macs.

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The World of Colour

I’ve been restoring and colourizing some old black and white family photos in Photoshop lately. Here are some of my favourites:

My grandpa Milner and his basketball team. Circa 1922.
My great grandpa Frank Milner. Unknown date.
My mom in about grade 4. Circa 1962.
My aunts and uncles and Milner grandparents before my dad was born. Circa 1943.
My grandma and grandpa Scoville on their wedding day. Circa 1942

I’ll save the rest for another day.

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One Second Everyday 2021

Having a three year old and a two year old brings its share of ups and downs but the ups are super fun. We didn’t travel a whole lot however we found fun things to do here in Lethbridge and on the occasional trip to see the grandparents.

Here’s a look at one second of each of my days during 2021.

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Paper Craft Delorean

Back to the future DeLorean time travel machine made of paper

The DeLorean is a two-door, two-passenger, rear-engine powered sports car manufactured and marketed by John DeLorean’s DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) and was sold in the United States from 1981 until 1983. Although it was a commercial failure, it captured the public’s imagination when it was featured as the vehicle Doc Brown used to make a time machine in Back to the Future.

Here’s a paper craft project for fans of the Back to the Future DeLorean, (you’ll find each pdf has a different version — one for each movie).

Translated from the archived source, the author describes them as such:

Tomo is a work designed for children, which can be assembled by simply inserting it without gluing for a certain presentation. I made four types that appeared in the movie, but the flight type was impossible.

I used glue on the ones I put together. I’m not sure how it would have worked otherwise.

DELOREANpart1
DELOREANpart2
DELOREANpart3
DELOREANpart3R
parts

Although the original plans are gone from the source site, they have been replaced with updated designs. Check out the pop-up style Delorean with an accompanying YouTube video.

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Disney Art Featured at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hopes to entice visitors with 150 Disney artifacts.

Watch a preview of the exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts,” on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from December 10, 2021 through March 6, 2022.

Pink castles, talking sofas, and a prince transformed into a teapot: what sounds like fantasies from Walt Disney Animation Studios’ pioneering animations were in fact the figments of the colorful salons of Rococo Paris. The Met’s first-ever exhibition exploring the work of Walt Disney and the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ hand-drawn animation will examine Disney’s personal fascination with European art and the use of French motifs in his films and theme parks, drawing new parallels between the studios’ magical creations and their artistic models.