Series Finale, New Covers

First… woot woot. The Ahmbren Chronicles’ series finale is out and available! I think from here on out… standalone novels, not trilogies.

In regards to AI generated art… my feelings towards AI are complex these days. I don’t think an outright rejection of it is practical in today’s world; nor do I like the idea of turning my creativity over to it, even when acting as an ‘art director’ for the book covers. Ultimately, adopting the generated covers helped book sales and brought imagery to the covers that was, in my opinion, an objective improvement over my own drawing capabilities… but in the end they were unsatisfying. They felt too slick and definitely clocked them as a particular art style from a particular year of capability that Microsoft CoPilot was able to generated (before CoPilot was realigned to use ChatGPT).

I wanted to go back and redraw my covers, but that’s not going to happen overnight. For now, I'm taking a hybrid approach to AI generation and cover art. The current AI covers started at text prompts... then you 'hit the button' multiple times until you get something that's close or workable. Then I would do polish and edits from that, sometimes assembling multiple pieces together as a collage. However, that was definitely more AI and less me in the process. For this next iteration, I've taken hand-drawn art I've made and used it as the seed prompt instead of text, and then the tool takes it and refines it. I get more of my vision. Then I do post edit and corrections as well, from re-coloring and smoothing to whole-sale edits (painting to redesign clothing or painting over mistakes). Here's an example of original work (advertisement posters I did in 2014) put through this process, old and new.

Original hand-drawn advertisement posters from 2014, done in Clipart Studio

Remastered images using my art as the prompt, then further refinements manually in Clipart Studio.

Taking this hybrid approach, it moves my cover art out of the realm of “AI generated” to “AI assisted” in the Amazon KDP terms of service. I’ll keep grinding away on my own drawing skills, but for now this is where things will likely stay. Over the next few weeks, the book covers will be updated. Then, there will be a slow effort to migrate the rest of the site to either drawn by me, or this hybrid approach, to try to get away from the pure generation. I doubt I’ll redo the book trailer videos.

In the meantime, the site will be in a state of transition. This isn’t my full time job, and much of this work is done in the margins of life, when I can, as a passion project.

Cheers all!