Making Art with Digital Demons: Some Faustian AI Experiments in E-Commerce

Because you can just literally summon a drawing of a demon being summoned to summon me artwork these days. No deal with the devil required….Unless we’re branding the tech companies as The New Devil?

The naughtiest, most dangerous and damning thing one could do growing up in my house wasn’t to sneak into the liquor cabinet or stay up past bedtime — it was to play with the banned occult books on the highest and only forbidden shelf in my grandmother’s library.

And so of course we did — whenever the opportunity allowed. When I was left home alone — guess what I was doing? Seventh grade sleepovers at my house were a crash course in all kinds of witchery — but the penultimate would be waiting for my grandfather to fall asleep in the living room so we could sneak past him as a not so subtle pack of pre-teen girls, infiltrate the little library at the center of the house, climb up the furniture to reach the top shelf and extract whatever book we could snag.

The choicest of the banned books of that shelf was an aged copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon — which is essentially a giant catalog of demon lords, who if summoned correctly, will come and help you. Like Pokemon, each of the demons has its own attributes, each works best under certain conditions, and each performs best for certain types of trainers. The art of summoning them is called goetia and the practice of summoning them goetic theurgy. Goetia was a much popularized form of witchcraft and wizardry that spiked in the 16th and 17th centuries as a sort of alchemist’s pathway to consort with demons if they were stuck and needed to push forward on their personal desires and professional scientific exploits. Where female herbalists and midwives around Europe were being hysterically burned all around Europe, their wealthy male counterparts in the courts were allowed a lot more leeway to literally consort with the devil.

Obviously, my seventh grade slumber-party attempts not withstanding, we were never able to summon up a demon lord or even a demon imp to make manifest our visions. But that’s okay, because we have generative AI now. And playing with it gives me the feels I expected to feel had I been able to summon up something more mythic.

But that’s actually my favorite things about myths and magic — all of those stories of special powers and magic devices all across the world’s storytelling landscape — from ancient myths of forgotten gods to modern science fiction — are all actually one giant, cumulative tech request list from humanity. It’s our to-do list over the centuries for what we can build to do the strange things we’ve dreamed. And ‘lo though it has taken many millennia, we now have a variety of digital demonic assistants at our beck and call — from our Alexas and smartphones to this latest crop of genAI tools that will write us a story, draw us a picture, make us a video, or create a video game just from our most basic of instructions.

The basic genAI toolkit has been out for awhile now and brings its own basic glee — but something was always missing for me when it came to actually moving forward with most of it: what to actually use it for. ChatGPT is all well and good, but I still like to write my own randomness. The video and video game tools are still at the beginning of their trajectory and glitchy as F so they’re not ready to churn out things yet. Meanwhile, the image generators started out a bit hazy at following directions and typically churn out only a small resolution image. But still, they definitely bring me the most joy out of the current working genAI tool types.

So I’ve been checking in on them periodically and not only have some of the visual genAI tools gotten so much better over time at giving their wizard what they ask and increasingly more adjacent tools popping up around them — so much so that the tiny little graphics are now starting to be scaleble and therefore usable for actual goods and art production.

Over the holidays I spent a bit of my time procrastinating from proper adulting by sussing out the pipeline of assorted lovely tools that lead from low res goetia art (i.e. concocted by yours truly but carried out by my digital demon hoarde), and through a series of virtual alchemical processes to translate the efforts back into physical products purchasable in assorted online e-commerce forums.

My second attempt at a coloring book through this process: a robot and valentine themed coloring book, available printed and bound and looking all official like a proper coloring book from Amazon (via my affiliate link) and/or available as a digital copy you can download and print yourself on Etsy.

Simple Spellcraft: Creating a Coloring Book with AI

Years ago, I had trialed the Amazon coloring book process with the tools available at the time (Adobe Illustrator/Adobe Photoshop, with a bit of Microsoft Paint and Powerpoint and Amazon’s bulky .epub interface). I made a comedically bad archaeology/egyptology coloring book. It was such a relief to re-visit the process and see how streamlined it had become.

You can go straight from Dall-E into Canva with the basic resolution (or ensure its awesome by running it through something like bigjpg or Topaz.Ai first to scale up the AI resolution). From Canva you can go straight into Amazon’s system — though you do still have to trick their cover interface into doing what you want. And then, of course, you’ll likely have to go through five rounds of back and forth on formatting to get your inputs right for Amazon’s physical publishing system. But then: voila! They’ll have a coloring book up there of whatever insanity you felt like making for yourself or others to color in. I should also note that I did a quick trial of all of the main and a few of the less well known image generators. And while I know lots of folks have been leaning towards Midjourney — Midjourney still feels #2 compared to what Dall-E can conjure.

Essentially: A coloring book = (Dall-E + bigjpg) + Canva x Amazon KDP

My first attempted coloring book using digital demon tech. “All of the Apocalypses: A Meditative Adult Coloring Book of all the Scientific, Geopolitical, and Mythical Ways the World Might End is available in proper paperback as a full blown coloring book on Amazon via my affiliate link here. A digital copy for you to print yourself is also available, via Etsy.

I trialed this new coloring book workflow creating a piece of New Year’s/futurism dark humor coloring book describing out all of the possible apocalypses from myth, religious legend, geopolitical scenarios, and environmental downfalls. I named it “All of the Apocalypses” and you can get a glimpse of it above. It’s definitely a bit of a downer on one hand, but it was kinda inspiring working through it and imagining all the possible scientific advancements humanity would need to overcome the real scenarios.

I’ve posted my second attempt, a Valentine’s Day love letter to the future of Robotics “Be My Robot Valentine” above.

(International, non-US readers please note: Amazon KDP doesn’t automatically pop in regional Amazon stores, you may find you either have to order from the US’ Amazon.com directly and/or shipping/access constraints)

One of my personal favorite pieces of new art (if I do say so myself #SmugAs) — is The Lonely Sentinel here — it’s my first Archaeobot — a robot anachronicstically popped into a scene or artwork of an earlier civilization. This one is wandering ancient Roman Ruins and plastered on a tote bag. This and other archaeobots and assorted other creations are available from my Etsy store Valkyrie Stregha

Advanced Spellcraft: From Dall-E to Etsy

Knowing my digital Dall-E demons can create much more complex art than just coloring books, I wanted to go back to another long-dropped experiment: Etsy.

Ages ago I had worked out some of the frustrating software chain to get drop-shipping from Printify so that anything I design could be populated on super high quality professional products and be shipped lovingly on my behalf (i.e. half the battle). But after a few attempts at translating various bits of data (LiDAR dresses, astronomical notebooks,etc) into products, I’d long since left it to languish. Coming back to it and realizing how much social media now exists around Etsy was a steep learning curve that I accidentally am finding myself in and definitely still trying to find my way in to see if I can tech/science/research/art my way into making a success out of it.

With all the new image generation and computer vision processing software available these days, it definitely made the art bit more fun and less of the stress-fest it used to be to take either my physical artwork or digital mashups and format everything into feasible digital designs for production.

The flow through process to go from describing what you want Dall-e to manifest for you to Etsy publication is a bit less straightforward than the coloring book pathway and has some variations depending on what one is actually designing, so here’s a sort of master software chain of this particular goetia with different option branches noted:

(Dall-E + bigjpg + (( Convertio (for SVGs) + (Adobe if colored SVGs required)) + Canva = Base content.

Base content + reworking in Printify’s interface = Base Product.

Base Product + Placeit/Canva/etc = Product Imagery

Product Imagery + Etsy Interface = Posted Product (which can then be cross posted using all the earlier permutations via other fascinating social media content creation tools).

Using experiments in these pathways, I’ve created an assortment of random geeky, witchy, alternative art in my Etsy store Valkyrie & Stregha — mostly things I like myself and that I suppose there’s a poss some other quasi-goth gamer scientist girl with morbid sense of humors and anachronistic occultist pop art tastes might also like (#thestruggleisreal #youarenotalone). There’s lots of robot experiments, some archaeology and mythology some astronomy and physics, antiquarian collections, etc.

I made this Wanted Poster of the World’s Rarest Stamps and plastered it on a t-shirt, tote, mug, and other things in my Valkyrie and Stregha Etsy shop as a present for my philatelist mom. If nothing else, I now have my very own pipeline to create personalized gifts and publish personalized books.

I also experimented with some assorted holiday flavors for Valentines to see if any sales might actually pop (and a few actually have, which is cool, I’ve made a grand total of $19 profit thus far). Have started some vague research to look in to all the other layers of software involved in actually like properly e-commerce-ing — -the analytics layers to help decide products, the apparently ever-changing algorithms for search engine optimization (SEO) on different channels, the never-ending glorious tools for all the marketing (like seriously, how do all you Instagrammers just jut out content like you do through these elaborate pathways of tools you navigate without even like a second thought or worry about how a post might be received) — but there is so much there, I’m not sure how deep I’ll go or how it will play out. We’ll just have to play it by digital demon ear…..

Of all the experimental AI art up thus far at my Valkyrie & Stregha Esty shop, The Bleeding Human Heart valentine graphic on the wall canvas have been the favorite of digital shoppers and passerbys (especially in Valentine wrapping paper form). I’ve got to say I especially love all this mock-up computer vision insanity that lets me pop my wall canvas and throw pillow designs into way more professional looking set ups than I’d ever get were I photographing this all myself.