Apologies…Typically, my posts cover a variety of topics and are more diverse. However, when I have a piece featured in an art show, I pre-share about it to bolster social marketing efforts.
Top Navigation: To explore more work by Jerry and get information about Jerry, use the top navigation. Design | Ideation | UX | Art | About
Scroll Down: To learn more about the work being produced for an upcoming and past shows, scroll down.
OVERALL: You’ve heard of the Honey Badger, this is the Beer Badger. This badger cannot get enough of their favorite beer. This card is me in a ‘beer’ form. As you can tell from the cards title, I’m a big fan of Sunking Brewry . This card pays homage to Sunking for all the great beers it makes (just for me). In fact, yesterday, I biked from Broadripple up to the Carmel location to get beer only available in the brewery. I love to taste all new beers and typically order flights of beer.
GAME ATTRIBUTES: This card is two-colored – red (speed) and white (purity). Two mana cost is low and fast. Upon turn 2 this guy can come out swinging. It has haste upon entering the battlefield. For 2 mana it can give itself double-strike anytime it needs it.
A link on my website will assist users in comprehending the anatomy of Magic: The Gathering cards. Understanding details will deepen understanding of the cards’ intricacies I’ve created
OVERALL: This is likely the only negative card in the entire set of 18. It represents the event from last year when I was laid off after 7 years with a stable, employee-owned company. Despite their claims of treating employees like family and making several promises, they let me go. While the exit was handled politely, it felt like a betrayal of the long-time promises made throughout my tenure. This card symbolizes the ‘basket of lies’ given to to me and all their other employees. I’m not planning to call out their name here but there is subtle hints in the flavor-text. The original name was One Bridge Basket of Lies.
GAME ATTRIBUTES: The mono-color is black. Instead of a creature its a curse that can effect gameplay of your opponents land. Typically, I’ve only seen phasing affect your own cards. When this card gets played it can target all opponents non-basic lands. It’s a really mean card and can make certain lands unusable for your opponents. It may be over-powered – I should have added “until end of the turn” to give a bit less power. As it stands, it can be lessened in power or made to be mythic-rare. In the actual game, if this card were to become really popular, it would be banned. Magic the Gathering keeps a banned and restricted list.
All reveals are available in one place at the card by card 2024 reveal section
A link on my website will assist users in comprehending the anatomy of Magic: The Gathering cards. Understanding details will deepen understanding of the cards’ intricacies I’ve created.
OVERALL: This card humorously depicts my penchant for collecting hats. With over 50 caps in my collection, I can’t resist purchasing one whenever I come across an interesting design, whether it’s in a store or at an airport during a connecting flight. However, I have specific criteria: the cap mustn’t be too new or stiff; it should be pliable and comfortable to wear, with a logo that isn’t too large on the front.
GAME ATTRIBUTES: Colors are green/blue. Blue is the trickster color and allows for lot of changing of cards on the battlefield. For 2 mana, this creature can become any creature on the battlefield. Its not too powerful, the effect only lasts one turn – At the end of the turn it will revert back to its original form.
All updates are available in the card by card 2024 reveal section
OVERALL: This card is about how I carry myself. I am quiet more than most people but I extremely well at listening/ observing skills – I typically pick-up details that are often missed by others. I am also strategic in my actions especially with design work. I like the long-game. Seeing and discovering patterns which add up through time to something bigger is important.
GAME ATTRIBUTES: Black/Green Deathtouch creatures are the worst adding forced in-game fighting is a extra layer of board state removal making for very successful single play creature spell.
A link on my website will assist users in comprehending the anatomy of Magic: The Gathering cards. Understanding details will deepen understanding of the cards’ intricacies I’ve created.
This piece is available for review at the Schwitzer Gallery at Circle City Industrial Complex (CCIC) through June. It remains unsold and will be off the market at the end of the show on June 30th, 2024. It is priced at $2,000.
All updates are available in the card by card 2024 reveal section
“OVERALL: This card reflects my perspective on the world around me. I’m not one to destroy; rather, I thrive on creating connections, meeting fascinating individuals, being inspired by other artists medium, nurturing ideas, observing group discussions unfold, and occasionally tending to my garden. I hold onto hope that the efforts I put into growing something will yield fruitful outcomes for all involved.
GAME ATTRIBUTES: This card’s core function is to allow the player to place an extra land per turn. This will allow the player to grow their resources faster than the other players and eventually allow them to cast more spells over the course of the game.
A link on my website will assist users in comprehending the anatomy of Magic: The Gathering cards. Understanding details will deepen understanding of the cards’ intricacies I’ve created.
This piece is available for review at the Schwitzer Gallery at Circle City Industrial Complex (CCIC) through June. It remains unsold and will be off the market at the end of the show on June 30th, 2024. It is priced at $2,000.
NEVER FORGOTTEN: Perhaps I originally forgot my wife from my artwork, but I didn’t let that end there. Today I released a limited edition card just for her. The flavor text says it all. She was very pleased with the card and I expect a foil-version of the card to be printed and arrive next week. AND when my piece doesn’t sell ($2,000.00 – If it does sell, I will be shocked), and returns to me, this card will be replace one of the duplicates. I haven’t revealed the full piece but we have 1 more week.
BACKGROUND: My wife loves dogs, flowers and gardening in general. She is truly a grower of all things, including me.
Happy Mothers Day for the women (and other people) who have supported and brought forth new life into our challenging and shifting world so that hope will shine eternally in our hearts.
I like to wear a small part of my artwork for the opening night. Sticker Mule did a great job this year with the ‘direct to garment’ custom t-shirt process. I was really happy with the results.
Above is a detail of the shirt graphic. The color is bright and detailed and the image is well-adhered to the fabric. I would definitely recommend Sticker Mule custom tee-shirt process to any organization needing fast efficient images applied to tee-shirts.
In any art show where works are displayed, it’s essential to provide background information about the piece you’re viewing. A statement adds depth to the viewer’s understanding, enabling them to suspend or support their judgment more effectively.
Before you form judgments based on the media frenzy surrounding AI and AI generative imagery (AIGI) creation, I urge you to hear me out. I’ve thoroughly considered the subject and its role in my work and have taken great care to explain it below. I meant for this post to be a short post, but its gotten longer and I can’t seem to disconnect all the logic and writing without removing deep meaning to it all.
BEFORE MY PIECE: I had judged AIGI as negative and damaging to the arts and looked away and ignored AIGI. I also believed algorithms could NOT create imagery that competes with human artwork.
RESEARCH & INPUTS: It was clear I was going to need to explore the current status of AIGI. Besides reading a large amount of articles, I joined two opposing Facebook groups on AIGI to see what people in communities are saying.
1) One group was pro-AIGI and its channel is devoted to people who talk less and produce more. A lot of the posts are amazing and beautiful images, “AI Revolution – MidJourney AI, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion” – This group has 234k members. There is not any writing as much as showing images created by AIGI.
2) The other group, “Artists Against Generative AI ” which frequently post anti-AIGI content – This group has 98.4k members. I have learned a lot from both groups. One pushes hard and demonstrates work produced by AI and the other group tears down the AI and post real-world damage to artists and art.
HOW DOES AIGI WORK?
I didn’t conduct deep research in this area but I’m sure its the image sampling inputs at the heart of controversy. (See image below)
RESEARCHING SOFTWARE: I was going to need to play with AIGI and see what it was all about. How are others making imagery? What software or online platforms do I use? Is it free or does it cost money? How much does it cost. I’m not going to pay for something I don’t understand or can see what it can do. I can’t do explore without a project or parameters and I didn’t want to read about it and regurgitate what I read from other people. This subject will most likely be its own post eventually.
PLANNING: To give my project a personal stake, I had to make it close to home and fun. Being a huge Magic the Gathering nerd, I decided to set the magic card as the format. Each card has art and text – it’s going to perfect. I also have a secret dream to be a magic card creator. (I took a test to become an intern for Wizards of the Coast and didn’t make it in. Out of 2000 test applicants, 2 people had perfect scores – Good bye dream!) To make it personal, I needed a reason for each card. I had some thinking to consider – Should I make one large format card? or should I make several actual cards? After some experimentation and testing, I decided to make cards based on my attributes in life. That went far, but it wasn’t enough since our lives are shaped by other people in our lives. – I began to widen the scope by adding other people as card stories. How many cards make a great story?
MY ROLE: Since I’m not producing the images or the text but I am directing someone/something else to produce work, My role was similar to an Art Director more than a singular artist. I was instructing others what and how to write / illustrate based on my project parameters.
CARD TEXT & STRUCTURE: Each card would be considered a ‘story block’. I first made a listing of 30+ card ideas knowing many of them will not make into the piece. I started with the basics, Title, Color type, Card attributes, flavor text and imagery description. (see Magic Card attributes) I chose the title and asked ChatGPT to write the flavor text. Sometimes the writing didn’t support the title and I re-wrote the title to focus the output text. I learned a lot about ChatGPT. I was really surprised that ChatGPT even knew what flavor-text on a magic card was. I asked for writing several times, once I was satisfied with the text, I moved on to image creation. Below is the text for card #4 or “Jerry, the Grower of Things.”
IMAGE CREATION & TRASH: After researching all the free AIGI applications, I found one that would produce imagery that looked professional, not photographic and somewhat illustrative in nature. This is where I learned about prompting the AIGI software. Prompting is similar to coding but regular English words – I am still not a master but I could get images to be produced to my liking. After producing 50-100 images, I would rank every image based on detail, imagery and composition. Every final image in each card took the making of 60+ images unusable for various odd reasons. Some images didn’t complete due to rules of imagery.
SURPRISE & FASCINATION: While on each prompting expedition, my goal was to be looking for the closest output of my prompts. I was also having fun in some regards to how the software would interpret some of my prompts and show me images that were actually better directions than the one I was pushing for. One day I will share the trash but that is another post or another piece to produce?
GRAPHIC PRODUCTION: Now that I had all the building blocks, I still had to assemble the card (See Attributes) and some details that I didn’t plan for that make a magic card a real magic card. Each card needed to look like a legitimate and playable magic card.
FINAL CARD WORK: Below is the final version of ‘Jerry, Grower of Things’ 4 of 28 cards. Now you have seen 1/28th of the final piece.
LAST THOUGHTS: Not sure how my piece would be accepted by other ‘artists’ at the one piece show. My assumptions were: 1) I expected was other artists at the show to hate my work since it was using AIGI. 2) I also thought some people might feel left out from my story. I only had 28 cards, I definitely have more than 28 people to include in the piece. In the end, I was exploring within a timeline and was probably sloppy and insensitive to leave out people are in my life and should be in the piece. What could go wrong? One person did speak up – my wife. I hurt my wife badly for not having her as a card in my show. It hurt me that she would take to heart and be hurt so deep. I love my wife so much – she is the grounding element of love in my life – It was not my intent to hurt anyone, especially her. I hope to find a way to fix this in both our hearts.
The opening night was well attended by friends and family to see some of the best Indianapolis local work. I was greeted by ‘the’ Dean Johnson (Scott Johnson and Bruce Dean) I conversed with many friends not seen since last years one piece show. Ultimately, the night went well. Thanks goes out to Centerpoint Brewery who donated beverages for the night.
The show was originally scheduled for end of May but due to another showing cancelling, this show will run an additional month, June 30th.
Where is my piece? It’s noted by the red arrow in the above photo. If you come into the CCIC Schwitzer Gallery turn right and follow the wall. I typically don’t reveal my work until the first week running of the show. I will start dropping hints and clues.
JVS 