Tracing creativity

Something drawn or painted on paper or canvas

An image that stuck — a face, a scene, something online

A craving for a new technique or material

A constraint (a brief, a deadline, a leftover material)

Anger, grief, a critique of something in the world

Years of figuring it out alone, with the internet as my teacher

Artists I copied until their moves felt like my own

The crit room, the group chat, the friend who never lies

Workshops, residencies, or intensives that shifted something

AI retouching (skin, sky replacement, face refinement)

Background removal or smart subject selection

Reference search (Google Images, visual search, "find similar")

Generative suggestions (font pairings, palettes, composition)

Spell check, smart guides, snap-to, auto-align

Voice-to-text, auto-transcription, captions

I asked an AI to make something and some part of what it made ended up in the final piece.

Text-to-image (Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Firefly)

Image-to-image, using my own work as a starting point (style transfer, img2img, ControlNet)

3D generation (Meshy, Luma, CSM, generated textures)

Animation or motion (Runway, Pika, Kling)