Increments Do Add Up
Feb. 8th, 2026 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerTrying to draw something every day and saving those efforts has built up a bit of an archive. There are now files in it somewhat over two years old. On a whim I looked back to an early month I haven’t revisited for some time. The thought “Good grief, I have improved!” was strong enough to surprise.
Qualifications hedged back in. Getting further into the foothills might only make the heights above more defined. My simple sketches look better to me at first glance than the ones I managed two years ago or even a year ago, but I still haven’t put a lot of effort into figuring out how to add the polish (unobtrusive linework and colour shading, for example) to be found in the works of other people. There’s also the matter of “of course you’d be trying to draw that.” That seems the reason I’ve only made two posts here (and only here) including sample images. After that’s been said, though, I just might keep posting here because some variant on “I’m my own best audience” applies, and the positive feelings I keep finding with a drawing in progress or just finished seems similar. The fresh realisation I’ve managed to improve is a bonus.
Along with that I remain conscious I pushed myself through that first feeling of awkwardness while telling myself “the more I draw, the better I’ll get” by starting at “what if I show Stable Diffusion what to start with instead of just ‘prompting?’” I don’t know how many other people managed that transition as a great divide opened on that general subject, but it’s something. (For a while I did keep the Stable Diffusion on my then-second-best computer because it had a module that would start with a picture, including my own, and guess what “tags” might be applied to it, but when that computer aged past the point where the last macOS version it could run wasn’t supported by Homebrew either I put that behind me as well.) The one wrinkle is that while “download this file and this file and things might get better” wound up not appealing and there might well be bigger problems with “use this commercial service,” I still wonder about being told “what you generated was real junky; unfortunately, it’s harder to tell the difference now...” Regardless of whether I’m part of a rear-guard effort, though, the satisfaction I’ve found in doing things myself has wound up greater than the not quite instant gratification I’d churned out before.
Qualifications hedged back in. Getting further into the foothills might only make the heights above more defined. My simple sketches look better to me at first glance than the ones I managed two years ago or even a year ago, but I still haven’t put a lot of effort into figuring out how to add the polish (unobtrusive linework and colour shading, for example) to be found in the works of other people. There’s also the matter of “of course you’d be trying to draw that.” That seems the reason I’ve only made two posts here (and only here) including sample images. After that’s been said, though, I just might keep posting here because some variant on “I’m my own best audience” applies, and the positive feelings I keep finding with a drawing in progress or just finished seems similar. The fresh realisation I’ve managed to improve is a bonus.
Along with that I remain conscious I pushed myself through that first feeling of awkwardness while telling myself “the more I draw, the better I’ll get” by starting at “what if I show Stable Diffusion what to start with instead of just ‘prompting?’” I don’t know how many other people managed that transition as a great divide opened on that general subject, but it’s something. (For a while I did keep the Stable Diffusion on my then-second-best computer because it had a module that would start with a picture, including my own, and guess what “tags” might be applied to it, but when that computer aged past the point where the last macOS version it could run wasn’t supported by Homebrew either I put that behind me as well.) The one wrinkle is that while “download this file and this file and things might get better” wound up not appealing and there might well be bigger problems with “use this commercial service,” I still wonder about being told “what you generated was real junky; unfortunately, it’s harder to tell the difference now...” Regardless of whether I’m part of a rear-guard effort, though, the satisfaction I’ve found in doing things myself has wound up greater than the not quite instant gratification I’d churned out before.
