Associated Lesson: 🥸 Study 6: Character Turnaround

Back to this nativity scene from lesson 1.

Possibly the most astonishing part about this painting is that even those of us not in the Christian faith could tell right away that this is Jesus. He probably has the strongest character setting in human history.

One of the core tenents of this class is that you should only draw pictures you like. It takes so long to learn how to draw well, you need a special kind of fervor and zealotry to fuel you. The most rich fuel in the world is fanart. It’s the type of fervor that will let you draw a single subject 1000 times.

The most fervant topic for the majority of western art history is, well, religion. So we’re today gonna talk about jesus fanart.

Imagine you’re an artist of the Renaissance, your patron has commissioned a cool painting to show off to all his friends and subjects. He wants something pretty but pious. Something to show off the lavish splendor of his domain, but at the same time tell everybody that he’s a moral, upright person. Something sexy, but not lewd. One last thing: nobody looking at the painting knows how to read, so the subject had better be clear.

Like a typical commissioner, his request is full of paradoxes. These artists rose to the challenge:

The problem I want you to consider is this: how do you tell that it’s the same person over and over again in these pictures?

A character setting isn’t just a bunch of drawings. It’s all the expressions that the character will ever make in their lifetime. This isn’t satsuki’s intense face. Satsuki’s face is intensity itself.

When a character is long-running, these conventions organically emerge over time. For example, back to the Virgin Mary, she comes in some other poses:

“Swoon of the Virgin”

“Our Lady of Sorrows”

This one, I always thought was very cool, because she’s getting stabbed by 7 swords. metal af.

(They’re kinda like skins of the same character)

Do you see how the character setting is preserved yet, across all these Marys? The virgin mary was always represented in blue.

Lapiz Lazuli was the most expensive color, made from the rock of the same name, mined in modern day Afghanistan. It is worth more than its own weight in gold. In fact, part of the commission for paintings in the days of the Medicis is that the patron provides the paint.

As such, blue in old paintings was not just reserved for nobility, it was reserved for divinity.

Today blue is cheaper to produce, but we still have the name Marian blue, for its association with the Virgin Mary.

But Mary wasn’t the only character in the extended Jesus-verse. Just like preparing for convention cycle, fanart falls in about out of style. Artists had to stay current with this season’s trending waifu/husbando.

My favorite is St. Jerome. He’s like this RIPPED old dude in a red half toga thing, and he’s always thinking about DEATH. Totally metal.

There was once a group of contemporary artists who wanted to see who can St. Jerome the hardest

(I actually wanted to show you guys their Venus-off instead of their St. Jerome-off, but it was too thirsty, so you can look it up on your own time)

Whose St. Jerome did you like the best?

This is the process by which ideas come alive. We’ve mentioned before that the purpose of art is provide the most Truthful rendition of the concept.

Each of these artists contributed to the idea of “St. Jerome,” which endures, pretty much intact, to modern day:

Some more popular concepts are not just preserved, they’re even revitalized by living artists

In that sense, human art is an optimization process. Each artist discards what he finds untruthful about the concept, so what remains becomes memetic, highly self-propagating.

You might recognize this today as “virality.” It exists in all shapes and forms.

It can come from the official interpretation of skilled professionals.

Or from enthusiastic content produced by the average man

Concepts like “apple” and “cat” are close to reality, while concepts like “transcendental numbers” and “mortgage” rely on the existence of a whole sprawling network of other ideas to make sense.

The more an idea propagates, the more “Truthful” it becomes. This is a “Truth” independent of “Reality”.

Aside: “money” is a shockingly abstract concept that we interact with every day. The idea that we can exchange papers with numbers for goods and services, where the value is determined arbitrarily by “government,” and these values shift over time as a function of “economics,” but we’re ok with that is mindboggling to me. (And we’re in the process of abolishing the paper part of “paper with numbers!”)

One of my favorite poems is this:

The meaning of the poem roughly translates to this: we’re all part of the fabric of society: each abstract concept emerges from the foundation of the last. In essence, human society is one very large concept-refining machine, powered by fervor and zealotry.

(aside, the original looks like this, which feels like it was written by blk cat): Spelling itself as a concept also relies on the network of humans to maintain.

This is the concept optimization process is what we’ve replicated here, in the development of generative AI. Instead of using humans to repeatedly echo the best version of the concept, until it becomes refined, we use algorithmic techniques calculate the “best” version.

Sometimes, one off-concepts get preserved really well. For example, it is suspected that the modern-day canonical face of jesus is modeled after Cesare Borgia, from the house of the infamous Borgias. It was popularized at the time from a propaganda campaign aimed to control the papacy. According to history, Cesare wasn’t a exactly a very good guy. Unfortunately, it’s stuck that way.

Miku arrived at a similar watershed moment in history. The age of copyrights.

Miku was born in a time when corporations took out takedown notices for fanart. However, unlike most IPs of the time, she had a license that allowed you to make fanart of her.

You couldn’t exactly say you own miku, persay, but you could certainly make drawings of her and put her in your videos. It was legal to write a miku song, draw a miku picture and upload her to nico nico douga, in a way that you couldn’t do with the mouse. (Or even if this wasn’t what the legalese said, this was essentially how it was enforced)

And this model paved the way for the fanart climate of today. Despite what the letter of the law says, fanart is good advertisement, and so corporations do not generally issue takedown notices over pictures. Sometimes, the official IP even commissions fanart to promote the product. Eventually, people forgot about the era where fanart was prohibited

However, even though we have a lot more choice nowadays when it comes to subject matter, Miku had achieved a critical mass in the cultural consciousness, during this brief period of time where fanart was not good to draw. We’re social creatures: we see other people drawing miku, and we draw more mikus, and we don’t really question why.

In this age of machine learning, a great majority of our research is the elimination of mikus, to no great success. Our first product, Waifu Labs, learned how to draw a miku 1 year before it learned how to draw a man.

Put it another way, miku is a concept so Truthful, that in terms of representation in art, it is more concrete than the concept of “man,” something that actually does exist in the real world.

The beauty of Miku is her versatility. There’s snow miku, racing miku, deep sea miku, the list goes on and on. She is far beyond her IP owner, Krypton, at the moment. She is a concept created by the collaborative work of the artists that contribute different facets of her character setting. When a good miku concept takes off, and other artists acknowledge it, then it becomes Truth about Miku.

You can see this flexibility reflected in AI art. She can drive, she can swim, she can eat a hamburger, she can be a knight, she can be an angel.

And I think about that a lot.

I suspect it’s very similar to the way that people approached the extended jesus universe in the ancient world. It looks very austere to us today, but maybe in the ancient world, this is the equivalent of generalizability. People back then were not as connected people now, so maybe they don’t have a good concept of things like knights or swimming. They certainly had no good concept of a hamburger. And so, the virgin mary is posed in the concept of motherhood, one of the most generalizable concept of all times.

Art is and remains a medium to convey humanity’s utmost respect and fervor.

Truly, A timeless character setting that everyone understands endures long past the lifespan of any artist.

We ultimately endeavor to contribute a clod to part of the main.

Keep drawing!

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