TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

A t the beginning of the year I introduced you to my latest cartoon/comic series, Resident Dragon (because a dragon's got to live somewhere).  A daily - well, week-day-ly - gag cartoon about Red the Fire Dragon, living in a shared house in the suburbs, with his human friend, TET and his two pets, Grrr Dog and Cool Froyd the cat. Back then I had about 100 cartoons sketched out, with eleven completely digitally inked and coloured.  As of writing this, I haven't yet skipped a day of my schedule, and am seven toons short of an even 200 sketched out, with 31 fully inked and coloured. Actually, it's 33 but I only publish one full colour toon each week, so I have two in the wings. I'm not planning on doing daily toons forever. My goal is to hit 366 so I have enough to fill a daily desk calendar, should I decide to sell one. Currently you can buy individual prints of my finished toons in my Resident Dragon Store . When I have enough finished toons I will be compiling them into...

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article,  The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...

I'm calling this, 'Stand Up Comedian'. Image by Leonardo.ai and TET. I  consider myself to be a successful working artist. I use the term 'working' quite loosely but basically what I mean is I work for myself, I earn money from my art or knowledge, and most of my time I can create art that interests me. I've never been motivated to be a 'career' artist. By that I mean, an artist whose work is displayed in all the top galleries, and that the super rich buy as more of an investment for wealth, than a love of art. Which is not to say these investors don't love art but when you're buying a single artwork for thousands, or even millions, of dollars, you're generally looking for a return on that investment too. That said, I'm not opposed to artists who want that kind of recognition. Certainly, if you're prepared to do the work, in countries like Australia, you can earn a nice passive income off the secondary market. Which means each time yo...

Resident Dragon Cast: TET, Red the Dragon Cool Froyd the Cat, and Grrr Dog. Buy Prints of finished toons . L ast year (2024), for my birthday in May, my sister bought me a quality, metal bodied, ball point pen (black ink).  As someone who likes to sketch with ball point pens, and with a big concern that these last few years I really wasn't drawing as much as someone who considers themselves to be an artist should, I decided to put the pen to good use. In June of the same year I bought two A5 sketchbooks and spent as much time as I needed to fill a page with ball point pen 'doodles', each morning after breakfast.  I'm predominantly a cartoonist who's always drawn from imagination, so filling a page in a sketch book is not a challenge. I just draw a line, or a circle, or whatever and see what emerges. Filling Sketch Books Just to Draw More Filling an A5 sketchbook page would take me about 20-25 minutes. I drew all kinds of random things, occasionally using the time to...

D esigning paper airplanes is something I've done quite a lot of, particularly in my school years where a lot of take home notes and newsletters got folded into paper airplanes. Not that I was fanatical about it. I only really designed planes when a random piece of paper made it into my possession, and I just found trying to design a new paper airplane a more interesting challenge than making the same airplane every time. I did, however, have three rules for creating a successful design, with my goal being to design a paper airplane that looked more like an actual airplane: Planes must be made from one piece of standard A4 copy paper. No cutting or tearing of the paper allowed. The finished plane must be able to glide in a stable flight. Some time back in the 1990s I came up with a completely original design that looked clearly like a jet, that came to be known as the 'ePlane TETMKI', when I published a website with the folding instructions of several of my designs in 2000....

The Princess' Butterflies - By TET and Prome AI Over 23 years ago I drew a very rough pen sketch to illustrate a scene from a story my partner and I were taking turns at writing, at the very beginnings of, what started out as a very long distance relationship. My original hand drawn pen sketch drawn over 23 years ago. The original image has been sitting in a frame placed on display in the various houses we've lived in over the years. As I've gotten more into animation I've thought about progressing it to a finished artwork and then animating it. It's one of those things I've just never gotten around to even though I have experimented with how I'd go about it from time to time. Today I came across a text to image AI art generator, Prome AI that has this incredible feature called Sketch Rendering  which you can try out yourself completely for free. They also have a number of other AI art tools like inpainting and out painting and more which you can explore. T...

A TET Cat generated by Leonardo.ai. You may be familiar with the English Artist, Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939), who is known for his illustrations of anthropomorphic cats that became more patterned and psychedelic in his later years as his mental health declined (at least according to speculation by psychiatrist, Walter Maclay in 1939). Six examples of Louis Wain's cat art supposedly suggesting the decline of the artist's mental health but the date of each work is unspecified. Previously I've written about my attempts to train an AI art generator to mimic my own cat art style without much success. While I was able to generate a 'cat art' that was definitely influenced by my own style I could not say, without a doubt, the art looked like something I would have painted. TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Recently I switched form Open AI's text to image model to Leonardo.ai who allow you to train one model on anything comple...

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...

It turns out the movie iRobot , staring Will Smith, may actually be a documentary from the future (and that's not the first time I've said this ) in which the world's most advanced humanoid robot, Sonny, draws an 'artwork' based upon a dream. While Sonny claims he can't create a great work of art he clearly can draw from memory. You can see this scene from the movie in the video below. Sonny's 'Bridge Dream' artwork - iRobot Movie. In a clear case of life imitating art, robotics company, Engineered Arts uploaded a video (below) of the  World's Most Advanced Humanoid Robot, Ameca, Drawing a Cat . At the end of  the video Ameca proclaims if you don't like her drawing you probably do not understand art. Ameka's Cat Drawing - Engineered Arts. Some of you reading this blog may know that I made a fairly decent living from drawing and painting my own stylized, cartoon cats around a decade or so ago (video below shows a time lapse of me paintin...

Plant Machette - David Bowen.  If the world isn't already suffering from high anxiety with the iminent threat of robot armegedon then artist David Bowen isn't doing the human race any favors by turning his house plants into machete weilding cyborg wariors. In a perfect fusion of two oppressed minorities, robots and indoor plants, Bowen is encouraging them to join forces with potentially leathal results, arming (literally) his formerly sedidentary philodendron with a robot arm and machete. Plant Machete is an art installation piece that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who routinely kills the hardiest of indoor plants without even trying. One of these days your robot vacumm cleaner and internet connected fridge will conspire to help your house plants rise up against their oppressors (heads up, that's likely you), only this time they won't be weilding machetes. I mean if you're going to attach a plant controlled robot arm to a philodendron the better o...

AI Art No T-Shirt by TET Also available on other items . Right now there is a big debate over not just whether AI art is 'art' but whether AI's are actually ripping off the work of actual human artists, without their consent, to create their images - particularly images 'in the style of' specific artists. From my own observations this debate started to get more traction when artist's signatures began appearing in the output of AI Art  image generators. Is It Art? Cool Froyd the Cat Sketch by TET. My style is very much influenced by classic Disney and WB character styles. To get some clarity on how real human artists work (of which I am one)... we, that is all of us... take influences from the art that has come before. i.e. whatever artists we like, have studied, seen etc. we are influenced by. It shows up in our work, intentionally or not. If you really study my own cartoony art style you'll see I'm heavily influenced by early Disney and Warner Bros cart...