Collage on watercolor, 9 x 12 in.

For the compassion project, I wanted specifically non-artists to show more compassion towards artists as a whole. I focused on the skyrocketing use of AI generated images and how its practices in stealing hundreds of thousands of artworks for samples in generating images have been putting artists out of their jobs, and give the false illusion that everyone can be an artist by typing words onto a screen. AI in recent times has also slipped into writing, photography, acting (both voice and live actors), as well as music, however, I wanted my posters to showcase the effects on traditional and digital artists specifically to narrow the topic.

The first poster shows a bust portrait of a person being “torn,” and the photos used to fill in the strips are specifically photos taken of nature and people. My intention for this was my belief in that nature inspires art: the earliest pieces of art in humanity were of animals, trees, and people doing their everyday routines. Therefore, the bust portrait is having their inspiration “ripped” from them by AI.

The second poster is of a head viewed from the side having the back of their head “shredded,” and the torn pieces dispersing across the page are from a photo of a woman watering her plants. I personally had the plants in mind to represent creative thoughts and ideas, and the woman being the person itself, tending to those ideas until they are consequently shredded and picked up by the robotic arms surrounding the back of the person’s head.

For both backgrounds, I laid out a single colored wash of watercolor for simplification and I felt that if I used any photos for the background, it would make the whole piece too busy. For me, gluing the pieces of torn and cut up photos was rather a hassle, and coming up with ideas for this project was rather difficult for me, but in the end, I went with a more simplified approach that can be understood by a person that doesn’t dabble into art often. It worked out in the end though, for everyone that saw these posters got the idea right away.