Obligatory history

Before Stable Diffusion 1.4 came out, I had been a professional graphic artist for the better part of a decade, and an artist for another decade before that, studying under people who worked professionally.

Within a year of that summer in 2022 when Stable Diffusion 1.4 and 1.5 became popular, all of my contracts dried up. I have been slowly but surely experimenting and trying new things, and while I get small jobs here and there, it is nothing like it used to be.

But that doesn't make me look down on AI art in any way. It just makes me think I'm not adapting correctly.

Pivot, Adapt, Overcome

To that end, I have looked into NFTs because I have been making it a regular practice and challenge to get on the platform formerly known as Twitter and engage with the very active and very awesome AI art community there.

Through my work doing that, I have received a growing amount of interest (as well as scammers) trying to purchase my art as NFTs. It has made me think that maybe I need to rethink my stance on what NFTs are and actually begin minting some work.

I have now minted my first piece, my first NFT, called Dragonfall Rider. It features an isekai engineering student who has crafted a prototype magitech vehicle that looks almost like a steampunk rocket car. In the sky above him are a few dragons circling in the background, as well as the ruins of an ancient keep or city on a neighboring mountaintop with some stormy, moody weather.

This is in what has become my favorite style that I have developed at this point: a very photorealistic illustration style with heavy fantasy elements that draw a lot of inspiration from 80s and earlier pulp art covers and posters.

What's Next?

One of the primary things I've been working on is what I would call modules or components that can be plugged into agentic workflows. These can turn people's stories or recordings of their D&D games into animated videos, all with their own custom artwork. They can also be used to create an Obsidian.md vault as a setting bible or campaign journal, complete with character artwork and images of major encounters, maps, and that kind of thing. And properly tuned, an agent like this could be a true companion—a digital companion or assistant to the storyteller as well as the players. It could act as a behind-the-scenes bridge to remind the players and the DM what they need to know via active listening to the game as it occurs, as well as screenshots of the map and player spaces (all depending on what their physical setup is).

You can go from as simple as just operating on the DM's machine to potentially synchronized access from all players in a virtual campaign, or even all players in an in-person campaign, especially if they're using one of those digital screens as gaming tables.

I think this is a service that people would really enjoy, being able to create shareable, watchable stories of things they did in their games. There is definitely a market for that if the friction is low enough and if the method of making it were in a format that people actually enjoy working with.

You can do it now, but you need a lot of technical knowledge and an understanding of what to do when. Whereas, if you build the right components, you can just create an agentic loop to cycle through them and generate everything you need. I've done this before with a book generator and a creepypasta short video generator, so I see no reason why we can't do this.

Well, except these things cost money to develop. I need money to pay bills every month, live, get food, and that kind of thing.

This is why I have launched an NFT and will be launching more in the future. Keep your eyes peeled.

Collect our Latest NFT Artwork. Only on Opensea.io for now.

And just for those of you that made it to the end of this blog post. This art piece is for you only, there's a similar piece posted to my X account but this one only exists here. I hope you like it.

"Jungle Dwarf vs. Hill Giant"