I switched to Winsdor Newton size 3 brush. It's big but it's giving me the line weight I'm after. I inked 90% of these pages with it and I think I'm going to keep leaning into the heavy lines. What do you all think?

Here's a more modern colorized version that I also think works. If you have wide range of digital colors available to you, you can do more interesting stuff with light. The problem with the original color treatment is that they weren't making any strong decisions about where the light was coming from. So it just became a shapeless blob. Adding consistent mid, shadows, and highlights with a clear light source really clarifies this image.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Just doing a quick redraw of the below and using a super limited color palette clarifies the panel and helps the main character stand out from the background. It's certainly not great but it presents the relevant information simply and isn't just adding details for no reason.

AI is a tool

Removing AI from your feed with 4 of my illustrations

This is what they took from you

Old sketchbook stuff. Interesting to look back at what I was drawing four years ago.

they read manga 🤷‍♂️

This is worth thinking about more.

My whole argument against AI is basically the same as the Space Pope's

Cedric was kind enough to respond thoughtfully. Here's my response. (I'd love to keep this dialogue going with other AI-positive Christians.) I keep hearing that statement from Christians: “AI is a tool”, which is true but also doesn’t address the issue, which is why I brought up the specific examples. Every new tool means that we will abandon an old tool. Every technology that our society adopts displaces a previous way of being. The Camera is an interesting example so let’s stick with it: In the century from the widespread adoption of photography we’ve moved from a literary culture to a visual culture. Images, Cinema, TV, Streaming, and Social Media have occupied the place that literature and pulp previously held. It’s not that people are technically illiterate, it’s that they don’t want to read if they don’t have to and they certainly don’t get their ideas from what they read. Just a few examples: - About 60% of 12th graders in the late 1970s read a book or magazine almost every day. By 2016, 16% did. (Monitoring the Future: Twenge, Martin & Spitzberg) - About a third of 2016 seniors read no book for pleasure in the past year, e-books included. That’s nearly triple the 1970s rate. (Monitoring the Future: Twenge, Martin & Spitzberg) Now we could debate if this was ultimately a good trade but it’s clear that one tool (The Camera) allowed the image to replace the word, creating axioms like “one image is worth a thousand words”. And this changed the way we communicate, process ideas, and even more importantly cut our links to the past where the word was king. A good example of this shift is how, in centuries past, social issue debates were fought with Bibles open. Now we use images and videos as our proof texts. So back to AI. AI as a tool has huge potential for rapid displacement across a whole number of spaces where I think many of us assumed there was a “no robots allowed” sign. Even the name itself, “Intelligence” was something we reserved for beings with spirits previously. So what will we allow this tool to displace? Can an artificial womb displace a mother’s womb? Can a chat bot displace a conversation with a human? Can a LLM displace a sermon by a pastor? Can artificial intelligence truly displace human intelligence? It’s a tool, yes. But it’s a tool that behaves like a human. Artists celebrating it are opening the door to a previously human-exclusive space. Basically saying, “Robots, Welcome”. Which then prompts my question: What other doors are opening? Where else are the robots welcome?