{"id":270,"date":"2026-02-22T19:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T19:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/?p=270"},"modified":"2026-02-22T19:31:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T19:31:40","slug":"stable-diffusion-as-a-watercolor-muse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/2026\/02\/22\/stable-diffusion-as-a-watercolor-muse\/","title":{"rendered":"Stable Diffusion as a Watercolor Muse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8211; Originally <a href=\"https:\/\/sudoroom.org\/stable-diffusion-artist-jam\/\">posted 2023<\/a> at the awesome Oakland hackerspace <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sudoroom.org\">SudoRoom<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If you\u2019re lucky enough to have escaped the media hype and don\u2019t know what Stable Diffusion is, it\u2019s part of a wave of text to image AIs that pop out art with simple text prompts. So you can say \u201cmake me a cat that\u2019s surfing mars\u201d and you\u2019ll get something instantly at the push of a button. It\u2019s resting on the data used without permission of thousands of artists on the internet, and there are cries that the AI is ripping off many artist\u2019s work. It\u2019s even led to calls that computers will replace artists or continue to use artist\u2019s work for free without their permission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If a computer can create a vision cheaper and faster than an artist, then why pay artists to do anything at all or even interact with them? Why should anyone bother to make art if a computer can do it? Some people are already throwing up their hands and paintbrushes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-768x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-277\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-768x1024.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-225x300.jpeg 225w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-1152x1536.jpeg 1152w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-1536x2048.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5096-scaled.jpeg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Dancing with AI<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>At hardware hack night at SudoRoom we recognize those questions but at the same time, we\u2019re like\u2026 why not just dance with the AI robots instead? We whipped out our watercolor paintings and jammed to the prompts. It was pretty fun and having discussions in-person with raw materials beat out any online video conference meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here the robot showed us a Mexican surf hackerspace with soldering, and we painted accordingly. Or an Ada Lovelace\u2019s hackerspace session, how it might have appeared if she had been coding and jamming with some LEDs. It was really fun and it led to a lot of cool discussions about art in the&nbsp;<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/web.mit.edu\/allanmc\/www\/benjamin.pdf\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">age of reproduction Walter Benjamin style<\/a>. For now the robots haven\u2019t replaced us, but they\u2019re helping us do more with less, at least until the algorithms improve and realize they don\u2019t need humans at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This proved to be a big hit, so we think we\u2019re going to theme our hardware hack nights and Thursday everything! everywhere! all at once! programming sessions on these topics. It was cool escaping the 2D computer screen for a while too..<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-273\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-300x225.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-768x576.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_5094-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I actually really hate these GUI tools but they\u2019re nice for non programmers<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-768x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-275\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-768x1024.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-225x300.jpeg 225w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-1152x1536.jpeg 1152w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-1536x2048.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_50982-scaled.jpeg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Keeping my painting hand steady in the onslaught of AI art tools by making LLM my muse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16,15,1],"tags":[6,7,44,43,41],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-projects","category-uncategorized","tag-inspiration","tag-oakland","tag-painting","tag-stable-diffusion","tag-watercolor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miromi.com\/artblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}