Master of AI art that spans the spectrum from cute and playful to downright terrifying, Douggy Pledger is the illustrator of gorgeous, full-color book To Hell with A.I., out now via Heavy Music Artwork. Unlike a lot of the books in the Heavy Music Artwork series, which feature drawings and paintings that would be likely to grace death and black metal album covers, the work in this one is truly strange. A 3d ai generator can add yet another dimension to such creative projects, pushing artistic expression into new and unusual territories. Looking for undress tools? You may consider checking out undress AI tool here.
“My work was seen by Alex Milazzo from Heavy Music Artwork, a fellow Sicilian in the U.K. like myself, who had seen my work online and made contact,” Pledger explains. “I already had the idea and title for the book with a synopsis that I was about to hustle. So the timing couldn’t have been better. It has been fun putting it together. We both share a keen interest in the macabre and also the lighter side of things. Even though something can truly look ugly there can be a lot of humor there, too. He was particularly drawn to the magazine covers I had made.”
While A.I. art is a fairly new field in general, and thus new to Pledger, the world of art is not at all new to him. He was raised with an artistic family and a father who created art for a living as well, and a grandfather who was a photographer. Artists may use AI tools like AI Nude software to edit their photos based on their projects.
“It was all down to my dad, Maurice pledger,” he explains. “Growing up, I would always sit with him in his little studio as he painted his animals, and I would draw mad cartoons and monsters. It was his uncle, Sergio, in Italy who also painted and drew cartoons, who got him started. My grandad was a keen photographer and developed all his own film at home in his darkroom. I’d often help him out and was fascinated in the process. So it was a mixture of all these men in my life that got me started. Painting, cartooning, photography, all coming together.”
Though he has been making art his whole life, it was just last year that Pledger discovered the fairly new medium of AI art.
“I first saw an AI picture my friend Scott Wetterschneider had made and posted online back in February. I couldn’t quite understand it. My journey had just started, so I had nothing to compare it to; it really felt like seeing a photo taken in hell. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. I desperately wanted to have a go, so I contacted him, and he got me in. There were only a few people doing it at this stage, so it was quite open and free to do whatever you wished. I couldn’t get off it. Totally obsessed, and quickly became their highest user, creating over 36,000 images in the first three months. I need my brain tested.
“The fact that it was creepy was what fascinated me most about it,” he continues. “The new version running now, version three, seems to be a bit tamer, but you can still get some madness from it if you push it. The unsettling effect, I think, is built in already, you just need to nudge it in the right direction. There were a lot of words and terms Scott and I used that are now banned, thanks to us probably, sorry. For instance, ‘Cronenberg’ and ‘flesh monster.’ Those ones were always great.”
Perhaps the most uncanny, and also the most entertaining and fascinating, thing about Pledger’s work is that it is at times dark but almost funny and irreverent, at other times insanely dark. As he explains, both his process and the nature of AI art in general allow for him to be totally random in his work.
“There’s no reason nor rhyme to anything I do. If I find something interesting or funny, I’ll give it a go. What interests me most, though, is making something else, using the images, like the stories and comics I’ve been making. As more and more people start using this, the more this is all starting to look the same. Or maybe I’ve just seen too much. My fear is that people will start to tire of seeing it. The trick, therefore, is trying to make it not look like AI.”
Follow his work at douggy.com.
