Welcome to the first edition of my brand new weekly newsletter-- The Artists's Press. Every week I'll be sharing my top tips for artists looking to develop their skills and take their passions full time.

I'll also be interviewing fellow artists & industry experts, sharing insights into my own career, and answering questions from readers like you.

With that, let's take a look at our top story.

If you've been in the art community on the internet at all the past few years, chances are pretty good that you've seen Sarah's work. Her comics, ranging in style from stick figures to full color panels, often feature Sarah and her cat on their daily adventures hurtling through life. And sometimes the odd cryptid.

Her work is funny, relatable, and authentic. At time of writing, it's resonated enough with the general public to result in her Instagram account having over 4 million followers.

But in her recent guest essay for the New York Times, Sarah shows how AI image generating models (like Midjourney and DALL-E) have stolen her art.

Sarah writes about how a random fan sent her an AI generated image that had used her name as the prompt. To her surprise and growing dread, the bare bones of her style were there. While by no means a perfect replica, it serves as an ominous warning for the future of intellectual property with the rise of AI.

The AI model was able to create a passable recreation of her work because, as she later discovered, her art had been included in the data sets used to train the AI model.

There are currently very few restrictions on how the images used to train AI models are collected. LAION5b, the model used to train Stable Diffusion, was built on the backs of six billion images scraped from the internet. Because LAION is currently registered as a nonprofit organization engaged in academic research, the current legal options for the artistic community are slim.

As AI art becomes increasingly commercialized, cases like Sarah's are only going to become more and more common. The idea that someone could effectively replace a living artist by training an AI model on their art is beyond disturbing.

Large lawsuits against organizations like LAION (who are scraping the internet for images that are later used in training an AI model used for commercial activity) seem inevitable.

The question is whether the art community comes out on top. For now, we'll have to wait and see.

This week on the main channel I shared the process behind my most recent painting, based off of a reference photo I took while living in Alaska. Trying to find the perfect composition for the forested waterfall scene was a challenge.

In the video, I talk about the three mistakes that keep ruining my art:

Overcoming these bad habits is an ongoing challenge, but one that's absolutely essential to the development of my artistic skills. I'll be making a point to have a very clear plan for my work going forward to hopefully resolve those last two, but the first point is an ongoing struggle for any creative.

I'm currently working on planning the last handful of paintings for my upcoming print collection, as well as brainstorming the next series I want to work on. Hopefully with a clear plan I'll make fewer mistakes going forward and create work with a more cohesive sense of style.

This month's exclusive video for Youtube and Discord premium members will be a behind the scenes look at how I'm planning out this latest print collection. If you're interested in getting exclusive video content, livestreams, audio newsletters, and early access to new videos, that's the place to be ;)

And that wraps up our first edition! See you next week! 💕