Unpopular opinion: AI art tools ruined my digital painting process

I used to spend 6 to 8 hours on a single portrait, layer by layer in Procreate. Then last summer I tried Midjourney for backgrounds and it felt like cheating at first but I saved so much time. Now I generate the whole composition in 10 minutes and just tweak the details in Photoshop. The problem is I barely touch a brush anymore and my hand feels rusty after 3 months of this. Anyone else feel like they lost a skill they worked years to build?

2 comments

2 Comments

umamurphy21d ago

The problem isnt just the rust though, its the creative muscle you lost by skipping the struggle. All those hours fighting with a brush taught you how to problem-solve on the fly and build color harmony from scratch. Now you are just picking from options someone else generated. Do you honestly feel like those tweaked details you add in Photoshop are your own artistic choices or just polite edits?

seth_allen21d ago

Oh man, I've been exactly where you're talking about. Back when I was learning to paint miniatures for D&D, I spent months mixing my own washes and glazes because I couldn't afford the store-bought stuff. Yeah, it was frustrating and half my early work looked like muddy garbage, but man did I learn how colors actually work together. I think you're spot on about the creative muscle thing. When you skip all that trial and error, you never develop that gut feeling for what needs to change. You're just moving sliders around in a program, not really solving anything from the ground up.