 minutes late but I'm Kim Diaz Holm and I'm here with my special guest, very special guest, the great Scott Kristensava. Hello. Hello. Hi everybody. Sorry for the little late start, it was all me, I promise. I was ready to take the blame for you. Thank you. I thought this time because the last time went really horribly and I wound up drawing that breast monster and so I think I'm going to try different paper this time because surely it was the paper's fault, not mine. It's always the paper's fault. I'm thinking something of the same because if you see what I have lying there, it's gouache. You have gouache and I have watercolor paper. So I thought I might try to embarrass myself with gouache and watercolor. I love it. I could pull out the gouache too if you'd like. You can. All right. But I haven't even thought about what we're going to draw. That's true. That's true. Hold on a second. Maybe since I've been torturing you every time I've been a guest on your channel, maybe it's your time to torture me today. That does sound fair. I'm not going to lie. It is. It is. Let me see. Let me get my... So I use hot press watercolor or hot press watercolor paper when I use gouache. I like hot press and I have some hot press as well. I just made an old man sound while getting out of the chair. So what is the best thing we could do for... Because we don't want to spend a lot of time drawing. We want to spend the time with gouache, right? Yeah, we can do the drawing as well. No, I'm saying we don't spend a lot of time drawing. I want to get something easy to draw, something we could do quickly. I even have a pencil. Look, look, here's my pencil. That looks like all of my little... I keep all of the little colored pencil nubs that I have in a little track here of my drawing table. And Donna's going to come down as well. She just brought me some tea. But Donna's going to come down and read some comments too. Yes, because my orientation on the phone is all weird. So all the messages from the right They're coming in from the right. Can you draw a giraffe? I can, but I won't. We could do a giraffe. Yeah, there's worse things than a giraffe. How about I find a picture? Can we send you the same picture or something? Yeah, but I don't have any means of seeing it. So I think I'll see a giraffe in my mind's eye. You are insane, my friend. And I'll embarrass myself that way. All right, you see? So he just will draw a giraffe out of his head. I have to look up a picture because I don't store that information in my mind either. I don't either. Well, I'll see. Using a pencil that's a strange device actually did use this pencil for a commission a few days ago. That was the first time I've picked up a pencil for a actual finished work in forever, in a year or so maybe. That's amazing that you've done so much work just straight to ink. This giraffe is already awful. Yeah, but you have an excuse. I don't. All right, let me see here. I'm going to do this over here. I need to. When things start going wrong, one solution is to make it more wrong. That's probably the best solution. I've found a funny picture of a giraffe, you know, where it's kind of more head on. And I think that is going to make it more fun. And of course, you know, you think giraffe, you got to go vertical orientation and but this is just a funny picture. So I'm going to just do this real quick. We're drawing a giraffe, dear. Some of us are drawing. Kim broke out a gouache. He was like, you know, I always torture you during your life. You know, when I go in your lives, he goes, he goes, you can torture me and we'll do gouache. And then so someone recommended, well, why don't you guys draw a giraffe? Because we were trying to figure out what to draw. So Kim is drawing one out of his head and I haven't looked yet to see what it looks like. Oh, please don't look. I'm actually drawing a giraffe that's pretending to be a flamingo. So the so the thing about gouache is I find that I use gouache when I want to see brush strokes and play around a little bit with tone and color. I use watercolor and ink when I want to do more design. And so like if I want to do something a little more art nouveau or whatnot. And so that's why whenever I'll do gouache, I'm always going to try to get a lot of area. That's why I'm doing kind of just a close up portrait because I want to see, I want to play around with color and brush strokes and whatnot. Actually, I'll listen to the gouache master and instead of doing this awful giraffe pretending to be a flamingo, I'll start copying your art. Yeah, I'll do you a one guy. I can just look you look at your art and then interpret from that. That's a silly looking giraffe, isn't it? Both of ours are lovely. Okay, so Donna just showed me both of our lives are sideways for everybody. No, shall we fix this? I don't know if we can at this point, can we? Let's try. If I do, is that better, Donna? If I do like this. Yeah. All right, that's better. So this will give us at least some surface area to, you know, to play around with color and yeah, because I would have done the full body. That would have been probably a problem with the gouache. Not a problem. It just you wouldn't have gotten the full effect because you're going to be just getting you can only get like, you know, like if you're drawing the neck and it's this big, you can really only get how many colors in there and how many brushstrokes, you know, so you this way you'll have just a little bit more chance to kind of play around. Yeah, and mine would have ended up like a cartoon flat collared thing or or something like that. It would probably ended up like a very bad attempt at flat coloring because I know isn't really good for that. It would have been absolutely wonderful no matter what because everything you do is magical. Thank you for lying. So how far how far I have been. Do you know how there are people who will like get a box of cookies or something or a bag of cookies and they'll eat just one cookie a day and they'll just savor it forever. I hate those people, by the way. Yeah, Spawns of the Devil, we call it. Yeah, yeah. So I've been doing that with Zelda. I go in and I play for 20 minutes. I go, okay, I did this one. I did the one, what do you call it, the shrines. I did a shrine. Okay, I'm going to go and do something else, you know, and that's it or or I made it through this or I beat this boss or whatever, but I am taking my time and so I am, I just finished the Goro city is where I'm at. So my whole family is playing Tears of the Kingdom at the same time and everybody is playing in different ways and almost everybody needs occasional help from me. So my wife is taking the, you know, the main route, the route that the game tries to push you towards and she's in the second temple, the Goran temple. And my youngest son has viewed the whole game on YouTube and knows every secret and he's not allowed to spoil it for us, but he had just, the first thing he did was just go straight to the, to the castle and get all the best weapons. Oh, guys. Yeah. And my eldest son has more been fiddling around and doing his own stuff and not played as much as the rest. Yeah. And then I basically, I've done the first temple and then I've just, I've just been messing around and getting more battery life for the sony devices and being a lot delving deeply into the deep. Spoilers. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I did on the first one Breath of the Wild. I just, I was like, I'll save you princess. And now I just went straight. I was like, you can count on me. And I just went straight and I just blew through everything, saved the princess. And then it was the game was over. And I was like, oh no. And so then I played it again where I just kind of wandered around a little bit more and so, but I had already kind of gone through the story. And so I felt like it was spoiled. So this time I'm like, the princess can wait. Zelda, I'll get you at some point. I'm just gonna enjoy this, just this moment for a bit. Yeah. And I, what I've liked the most so far is I'm a terrible builder. Yeah. But I really like building terrible stuff and try to launch it. I've found that if, if I can like, if I can not have to build something, I'll do it. Like I will literally spend 10 minutes climbing over a mountain to get a circumvent the lava that I got. And I will know, oh, you've got to fly from here to here or those little guys with the backpack. Oh yeah, take care of it. I was like, I'll just carry you. You know, so I'll walk all the way around the water. I'm not going to build the raft to get us across. I'll just walk us, you know. And I will build the stupidest, weirdest constructions that never work and always fall in 1,000 pieces. And I will use an hour trying to build that until I get up the wall that would have taken a minute to climb. Oh, someone just said that their favorite thing is to hold up the bolson signs. Is that the construct? Now, I only did it that one time. Are there, like, there's so many of them and of him and in increasingly more ridiculous situations. The first ones are very easy. And then some of them are kind of absurd. Okay, okay. I'd only encountered just the one. So okay. All right. So are you ready to start painting? Yeah, but I even have pence. Do you usually go straight on to the paint? I go straight over the pencil like this. So let me show you a little. I'll try to see. Because I have gouache paintings like this. These are kind of these are old. These are eight years old or something like they're six years old. But I don't use ink. You can see here. This one I actually varnished. So it's got a little bit of a shine. But you have to... I love the sena for your princess. She's so fun. She's so fun to paint and draw. Yeah. All right. What I do is this is my gouache palette. It's forever old. But what I'm going to do is usually find my mid tones. And I'm no expert. So take whatever I say with a grain of salt. But I'll usually find my mid tones. And I'll probably not come in with orange but more of a red. A little more of darker colors. Or I'm actually I'm looking here and I would maybe even come in purples or something. But I will just probably find a... I think what's the color that I want to come in with. I might just come in with paints gray and go over the whole thing with like a paints gray. Because I like building up. You do your darks. You go mid tones. I go darks and then you come in with the highlights last. And it's such it's so much the opposite of watercolor. And I just I love the feel of it. Okay. So I'll try to do the giraffe in a... I'll try to do it more of a rainbow giraffe since it's first day of pride month. That's true. It's true. It is. We're going to be going to our first pride festival on Saturday. Yeah. So we yeah mom's gonna be... Donna's gonna be wearing free mom hugs t-shirt. Excellent. Here in Bergen there was going to be a pride event for children in the park. And it got canceled because of threats of violence. So that's... That sucks. Even there, huh? Even here. Yes. We like... They had to fight to keep pride festival here in Franklin. And it's just... It's amazing. It's amazing how people could still just assume that people don't exist. Yeah. Oh, you're covering the whole thing in... Yeah. I'm just giving it a wash that way. It's gonna... There's just an undertone color. Like sometimes they'll go with... I did a... I did a Keanu... Keanu Reeves. Where is that? I mean... Yeah. I saw the video of that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's hard to do a whole painting in 90 minutes with gouache. Guache, you kind of want to take your time. You want a few hours. And it's a little bit more relaxing. But I did, you know, like red or... I think I did orange for the background. And only some of that shows through at the end. But you just kind of want to start with something. I'm gonna blow dry. So I'm gonna... I think I could get mute here. Let me see. I don't have a blow dryer even. You don't? Okay. Well, that's... No. I have to find my new brushes. I think they're here. Oh, they're already up. Get a bit of a thicker brush with water so we can do this wash. All right. I am back. I have so many things in between me and the paint. I've got two cameras. I'm trying to look around all of this. All right. Let's see what we got here. So I like... Can you see the orange on top of the paint's gray? Yeah. It's kind of got just a really fun look. And it's not a color that I would have normally chosen. But it's got just kind of a cool vibe. And that's really why I do that. Because the colors, you know, having that undertone just kind of makes it a part of the whole piece. Yeah. It is an amazing orange color. At least on the... On my side of the camera. So instead of blow drying, I'll try to dry it with paper towel. We'll see if that works. It might lift up some of the paint, but... It does. Yeah. But we'll have to work around that. Yeah. Or you can just... You can work wet on wet. It's just... Or you can just work a little drier with your paint, you know. Don't use... Don't treat it like watercolor. Treat it a little bit more like oils. And maybe that might help. I'll just play around. Yeah. If it doesn't work, then I'm just going to embarrass myself for 89 people, 90 with you. That's a very meager amount of embarrassment. Yeah. Yeah. It's still early. It's still early. There's still a lot of embarrassment to come. I'm sure we could find more embarrassment for you. Give it some time. Oh, yes. I will. So I've been doing this thing where I've been trying to... Do you ever notice like when you see like a John Singer-Sergeant painting or other masters and you say, it's like, why am I drawn to the eyes? Like a Rembrandt or something like that? And it's usually because that's where they put the blackest black and the whitest white, you know? That's... And so I've been trying to do that where whenever... I've been putting just the blackest blacks on the eyes and then everything else is a little bit more muted, a little bit more muted to hopefully try to draw your eyes there. And it's funny how you could be painting for years and years and years and then you're just like, oh, and then you add that technique to it. It completely missed me. I completely missed that. And every time for 54 years, I've been looking at paintings and then now I'm like, oh, they do that too. You're so focused on other techniques and other things, whether it be composition or color or whatever and stuff. And then there's people who pick that up their first year in college. And that was the thing that they got. And so you're just like, it's amazing how different artists will learn different techniques at different times. It was like it was completely invisible to me up until like four months ago. Yeah. I have it like that with a lot of stuff. I'm trying to remember the last thing where I got this sort of, aha, that's how everyone's been doing it. Yeah. And it's great when it happens, but you feel so stupid that you've gone so long without that knowledge that everybody else had. Yeah. But that's part of the fun of doing art is that you can't, you can't do it all. You can't learn it all. It's literally impossible. And it's always, it's always this, it's not an arms race because all the weapons we have are very much our own. At least now, in the beginning, it might be more of an arms race where we're just trying to learn techniques. But for my sake, I mean, one of the prime things that I feel I've learned the last few years is to become more and more comfortable with my mistakes. Yeah. Which is really hard. It is. It is. I've been, I've been burnt out a lot lately because art, making art was always something I did for me. It was always something I did to make myself, you know, like, because I was working on this and I would go into the hobbit hole or, you know, before we even had a hobbit hole and I would just paint because it's what made me happy. And now it's my job and I can't do bigger paintings because we have to create content every day. Oh, yeah. So I don't have the luxury to spend two, three weeks on a painting and and I can't paint for me. I can't imagine painting without a camera in my face. Anymore. It's just, it's really weird. It is. I've been feeling that as well. And I've, you know, I used to do my daily ink monsters daily with with a video every single day. And now I'm, you know, if I feel like it, I publish the video. If I don't feel like it, I might even not film it. And that just helps a little bit with the pressure I put on myself. But what's helped the most absurdly for me is the added pressure of things on new things I'm taking on. So, for instance, starting to work with the fairy tales and getting a reason to research the fairy tales I grew up with and making my own versions, that has been, you know, extremely invigorating. And then adding to that, getting to work with musicians. Yes. And having them compose music for me and then even playing with me. So that's it. I love that. You said that first the mid tones and then the darks. Yeah. So I am, I am if you I'm getting darker and darker, I'm trying to get all of the darks in. And then at some point, I'll probably just get bored and come in with some highlights. But right now the my mid tones are still too light. So I'm just trying to find the darks. And I'm just slowly building that up. The fun is once you've got all of that to start adding in the brush strokes and the highlights, that's when that's when you can really start to play. But I think right now it's just kind of like you're still in that early stages of like sculpting. Yeah. Okay. So sculpting. Let's do sculpting. Let's try to think like a painter. That's, you know, the major thing that I've learned the last five, 10 years is that there's a difference between drawing and painting. Yeah. Yeah. And sort of understanding what that difference is, at least for myself. Yeah. Yeah. It's been massive. Painting is something I didn't pick up until my 40s. And I didn't start gouache until 2014. I think 2014, 2015. And I, it was such a journey. It was such a fun, because I was always terrified of a paintbrush. I did colored pencil. In my entire career was colored pencil and markers because I was just, because you push a pencil and you pull a paintbrush. Oh, yeah. And I was just terrified of that feeling. And, but after 20 years of doing colored pencils, I got bored of that there was, nothing happens with a colored pencil that you didn't do directly. There's no spontaneity to it. You have to, you know, make whatever marks, whereas paintbrushes, you know, watercolor, gouache, oils, whatever, you can get that little flip of paint, that little splash of water, whatever it might happen that gives it texture. There's that bit of uncertainty that I really like. And it took me a while to get used to that. For me, you know, I always work with a brush. So I always, I always work with a brush. But my main different, my main problem, figuring out how to paint was figuring out how to think about, not to think about lines, but about marks, about, you know, because I work a lot in negative space and with that kind of stuff. And that negative space doesn't exist in the same way in the painting. Yeah. Yeah. And my apologies. I thought I hit the mute button. I'm sorry. You did not. But yeah, I forget that you do most of all of your work is brushwork. Oh, yeah. But I did also, I got one of those stone paper sketchbooks a few months ago. I still haven't tried it. But I am going to try it soon because I finally found a project for trying it because I watched your videos and a couple of other videos. And people say that charcoal works fine with that paper. So I thought I'd try charcoal and take that pad up in the woods and look for stones that look like trolls. I love it. I love it. I definitely stay away from any wet mediums. It did not like wet mediums. But yeah, I think it really liked markers. Okay. Definitely pencil wasn't great. It took it, but it wasn't. But I think you're right. Charcoal might work really nice. Yeah. So that's the idea to make a troll book with charcoal and stone because both of those are associated with the fairtales as well. Yeah. I love it. Stone. Seeing here ideas and all I did was draw a rolling stone or Emma Stone. Yeah, you got Cheech and Chong in there. I did. I did. But still, you got actual trolls. I love that. That's sort of a side effect of drawing things for free use. A side effect of drawing things that are available for free use is that I can't really draw a celebrity and then say you're free to use it. So even though I would love to draw the rock, I can only draw the rock for personal use. Yeah. So I can only draw my own personal rock. Okay. That's true. Now, theoretically, you could draw the rock for a video. You're just not able to give the art away for free. There are many things I could do, but why do them when I can make things hard for myself instead? I can't argue with that logic. It is impeccable logic. I don't know if I'm going to stick with this teal background so much as just I just needed to separate the giraffe from the background. Yeah, that's a pretty heavy teal. Oh, that's a thing I learned very recently. What teal is, I always thought teal was a completely different color. Really? Yeah. And then I bought some ink that I thought was blue and it turned out it was teal. What did you think teal was? More like emerald. Really? Okay. So we were living in San Jose, California at the time. It was the 90s and late 80s, late 80s, early 90s. The San Jose sharks, they got their own hockey team and the San Jose sharks came in and their colors was teal and gray. Teal and black. And so like we all really got to know the color teal. This is teal, you know. All right, so I am going to now start playing around with some lights and I think I am making a monstrosity. I love it. You went from ink monsters to gouache monsters. Oh yeah. We need to figure out how to model this more to sculpt it. Sculpt it. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there. We'll get there. I do like some of the color combinations that's happening. Good. So you know, really with gouache, the thing is watercolors tend to be a little more light, little softer. With gouache, you could really get dark. You could really get some contrast. And so I'm really going to push the contrast at some point. You know, I'm still kind of in that fleshing out stage, but you can really push it if you want to. Yeah. I'm thinking that I should push it towards the end of the process and hopefully the giraffe will fall over when I push it. This giraffe is such a pushover. Yeah, I've been thinking about some ways to do some series of drawings where perhaps I educate about copyright and draw celebrities and licensed characters and stuff like that, and then tear up the art, of course, at the end. Which I would, the reason I would do it, first of all, because tearing up, drawing something that you know you're going to tear up is actually a good feeling. Yeah. Yeah. It's liberating. And then also, the primary reason I would do something like that is not just to educate about copyright, but primarily so I can draw Sina as well. And both Sina, the warrior princes, and John Sina, and any Sina's you can find. It would seem to have all of those ripped up, but... Oh, it would be so fun when people complain. You ripped it off, but it was so different. I like that feeling. And it's sort of an important feeling as well. It is sort of a... It's a sacrifice of sorts. Yeah. You know, I have a company that I'm working with called Crowdmade, and they do stickers and t-shirts and things like that. And I don't really do much merchandise, but people like stickers and whatnot, but they keep asking me, they're like, when are you going to give us more stuff? When you give us more stuff? And I said, well, I have all of these... I've got paintings of Prince and Freddie Mercury and this, and they're like, we can't do that. We can't use copyrighted characters. And I had a publisher ask me if I wanted to do a book and more of a writing book, but they want my art in it. And they wanted like 150 pieces. And I said, I don't think I have 150 pieces that aren't... Because it's so much easier for me to just... Like, who did we draw on Monday? Oh, Tina Turner, because she just passed away from Music Monday. And it's so easy because I don't have to think of composition. I don't have to think of who is this character. I just find a photo and draw it. And it's done in 90 minutes and I'm good. And that's content. But it's not fun for me to do, but at least it gives me an endless supply of content. But then you go to a publisher and they're like, yeah, we can't use any of this art. They can use stuff like this. They can use, you know, like if I do like from the hair journal or something like that, but they can't use that. And I respect it. I really do respect it. So I respect the fact that everything you do is original. I just can't imagine doing that five days a week, seven days, you know, whatever. And my brain... I've run out of things to draw and I'm not doing what you're doing. I can't even imagine how you're... Just waiting for the next rock star to die. I have drawn rock stars, almost rock stars who died. I drew John Prine when he died because I love his music. But yeah, the constant coming up with something is really... It is really exhausting. And I'm noticing it even more right now because when I've gone back into... When I've gone into the fairy tales, I've also gone into storytelling again in a longer format than just the shorts. And one of the things that made me have to stop doing comics was that I had the stories on my mind 24-7. Couldn't let the stories rest. And now it's back again. It's back again. Guess who's back? Constantly thinking about storytelling. You know, I just see, you know, I do too. And I have so many stories I want to tell. I have so many movies I want to make and books I want to write. And it's so frustrating because it costs money. And it takes time. And right now, right now where we are is the money is coming from daily content. And there's no time for storytelling in a one-minute short. And I... But all your shorts are brilliant storytelling. That's what... Oh, thank you. I am finding some solace in finding story in, you know, we went to the Renfair today or something like that. I am finding some solace in that. But, you know, I have world... It's not the same. Yeah. Yeah. I love world building. I love saying these are the rules of this world. These are the events that are about to transpire. These are the characters. And then let them loose, you know. And kind of as you're writing it, watching the characters act according to their design deal with the events that I've set in motion, you know, set with the rules of the world. I love all of that. It's kind of like programming, you know, again. Oh, yeah. And I miss it. I miss it. But, you know, that is a very costly endeavor. But that's sort of why I started doing the ink monsters is because in order for me to get a kick out of a project, it needs to be... It needs to have rules. I need that world building, except that with the ink monsters, I could skip the world and just do the building. Yeah. And if I didn't have those rules, I would never have managed to, you know, make a monster a day for three or four years. How many years? Yeah. It is... I am addicted to those rules. I am addicted to that world building aspect. But that is also... It's not... World building isn't healthy for me. It's not healthy? Yeah, for me, because I get obsessed with the details of the world. And I put off doing it. And instead of becoming a creative exercise, it just becomes this ball of shame that you lug around. And, yeah. So having... Forcibly having the projects be smaller helps my mental health a lot. Okay. But I'm starting to stretch the limits there again with the fairytales. Because they are getting bigger and bigger. As long as it's something that you can sustain, that's perfect. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it's so fun. I've always been primarily in my own head, at least a storyteller. That's always been what's been important for me. I think you're the same. Yeah. I did a web comic series for 14 years called The Dreamland Chronicles. And it was eight books. It was 2,300 pages. And it was the kitchen sink of every fantasy, D&D, the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. John Carter of Mars, everything was in that. And if I could die and go anywhere, it would be that world. It's the world of my dreams. It's everything I ever wanted. And I miss it. I miss it so much. I was just talking to my son yesterday. Because I wrote it for them. And he's like, I wish he could do a TV show or something like this. I wish it too. It'd be so fun because I miss playing in that sandbox. I miss that world. And I get why there are artists who create a comic book. And that's all they ever do is that one thing for the rest of their life. They found something they loved. They found something that built that world, those characters that make them happy. And that's where they want to be. Oh yeah. But I could never contain myself to just one world. It would always be like a couple of worlds at the same time. Because that's probably somewhat linked to the bipolar as well. Because I would sort of need something to think about in one face of my cycles when I didn't know they were cycles. And then I would need something else to think about in the next face. And sort of one project would just remain dead until I got in the mood for it again. And then I would restart. Because I had always learned so much new. So it felt very much unsustainable. For me. It was a very hard realization to see how these things that I so wanted to do were linked to why I wasn't feeling well. Yeah. It's so frustrating to know you have worlds inside of you that you want to let out. So I feel that. Because you feel like if you don't tell those stories before you're gone, they're gone forever. Oh yeah. And that's sort of a general advice for for beginners is you know that these stories that you build in your head, they are extremely addictive and fun to make. Yeah. But if you can't actually put them out into the world, you're not actually doing the work sitting at home and dreaming up new worlds isn't the work. Yeah. It might be part of it, but it's not the work. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to bring them to life. You got to do the act. Yeah. When you see. Go ahead. When you see a lot of the criticism that comes of the MCU or Star Wars or the story of Breath of the Wild or whatever people are criticizing, it's often from the standpoint that yeah, but I could have dreamed of something better on the sofa. So why can't these people who get paid do it better? And it's because those two things are completely different. Yeah. Yeah. It is. In the case of that stuff, it's always too many cooks in the kitchen. You know, there's the corporate entities you know, throwing their two cents in, which always ruins it. But I think when it's someone like just you and me, stuff takes on a life of their own. Yeah. You know, and you have to let that stuff work out, you know, logically. It's like, you know, your characters will tell you, I wouldn't do that. You know, or your world will say, you know, this wouldn't happen. Yeah. And you got to respect it. And my biggest scare with AI art and stuff like that is not that it's going to take the jobs of or my job because it will not take my job. Yeah. That's I'm doing something else. I'm not a tool for other people's creativity. But my biggest scare is that it will allow producers to fulfill their creative dreams. Yeah. And then you'll really start to see the difference between someone who just dreams up something and someone who can actually make it. And you'll start to see why why Stan Lee never created anything of worth after he stopped working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and all those. You'll start to see why the sort of genius idea men why they always fail when when they're not working with geniuses. Yeah. And that's, you know, I think we will, in a little while, we'll start seeing movies and games that are produced more and more by AI and it will really reveal how important the craft of storytelling is. Yeah. Yeah. I've been really fascinated with the AI stuff. And yeah. You know, and and it's it is it is as a tool for artists. I think it's something that could be powerful. You know, I look at it as a member member when Pinterest first came out and artists would be like, oh my god, you can just collect all of this reference. You know, and I remember that was a thing. And people would kind of poo poo it and say, you know, you shouldn't do that or whatever it was. And but it's this I see that as the same thing. Sometimes I don't know what I don't know what I want to draw. And so I'll just type in something like Xena and a Pre-Raphaelite painting, you know, or something, you know, and see what and see what spits out. And then that takes me to, well, maybe it's not Xena, maybe it's Athena, or maybe it's this, or maybe she's shouting and and and I could, without having to sit there, I could visualize some stuff and go, OK, that's that's kind of what I want to draw. And then from there I could do that. But that's not what it's being used for at all. No, no, no. For me, I go, this could be fun as a tool, but not, you know, I it's funny. I've actually been duped by when, you know, when it was first coming out by like, I was like, oh, my God, these this art is amazing. I'm going to follow this person on TikTok. And and then I signed out, you know, months later, it was all all AI. They were just like, like, when people say, I'm an AI artist, like, how does that work? You're not actually, you know, do it like they weren't they weren't in any way even modifying the work, you know, it was so but I got duped. It can happen. I think I've gotten duped, but I'm not for long, but yeah. There's a friend of mine who is brilliant artist and we chat a bit about art and stuff. And his problem is that his art has a lot of the elements that AI is really good at doing. And he's not doing the over-rendered art, but he's doing those type of surreal, some mechanical, some architectural, some human stuff makes. And he's basically doing that type of surrealism that AI excels at, because, you know, you he has intention behind his art that AI can fake having intention. Yeah. And it can fake it very well. So he was really, really scared of the AI really pissed off and just got a, he got in a creative slump because of it. Yeah. Yeah. How could he compete with people who just do what he spends months and months on and do it in a click? Yeah. And we've been chatting a bit on and off about this. And finally, last time I chatted with him, I don't know if he has followed my advice, but my advice was just because he had started to play around a little bit with AI. Yeah. They didn't quite know what was ethical and could he do this, could he do that? Maybe someone will expose if he does something with AI for a work, a public work, maybe he will get exposed for doing it. Maybe some people hate AI and all that stuff. And my advice was just, no, no, no, don't worry about that. Jump in it and do everything it can do without shame. And then in, you know, if you get hooked, then you might use five or 10 years playing around with AI and come out a better artist on the other hand. If you don't get hooked, then, you know, no loss. Yeah. And so I'm really looking forward to seeing if he, if he does the AI, you know, he's an absolutely brilliant draftsman. So what would he do with AI? Yeah. Yeah. It's people are, you know, vehemently like, you know, you're dead to me, you know, if you support AI kind of thing. And I, here's the thing, I get that it is stealing art, you know, from artists, I do. And I think that's ethically wrong. But, you know, I mean, all of us artists are stealing from each other. We just, you know, I always say, at least acknowledge where you, you know, where you're inspiration, where you're, you know, is from. And AI doesn't do that. Yeah. But go ahead. And that's the thing is that people are looking at AI as a copyright problem, while it is in fact a attribution problem. Yeah. And much more. Exactly. Continue. Oh, but, you know, I, I look at, I've made images for myself to learn about AI. And when I've done that, I always do a Google search for the image. And I have never once been able to find anything that looks similar, like, you know, somebody else's art or anything like that. I've done, you know, anime 2D kind of, you know, I've tried every kind of thing and then tried to track it back to the original artists. And I've never been able to do it. So I, and every time I've seen artists say, AI is stealing my art and they put their art side by side, it's never directly their art. They're just like, it's stealing kind of my style or my color palette or the, and I'm going, but all artists do that. And again, I'm not defending AI art, but I'm just, I'm having a hard time finding that smoking gun that, that, that shows the only thing is, is I will get AI to spit out stuff where it has signatures on it. And I go, is this, is this someone else's signature that it's putting on it? But people have said, no, that's, you know, AI sees signatures, and so it puts its own signatures on a kind of thing. But I'm not sure if that's like AI apologetic. So there's still a lot of things that I'm still on the fence about as to what it's, what it's actually doing. But again, I'm, I would, I'm always going to side with the artists, but I, I think I'm also, you and I are in a very good place because we're traditional artists. Yes. So it's very And not only are we traditional artists, I'm going to, no matter how much you hate me for saying this, I'm going to hate myself more for saying this, but we're not only traditional artists, we are influencers. We, we, you know, a part of what attracts people to some people to our art is that they like the personality we're bringing forward in the art. And it gets, it becomes a personal relationship between us and people we don't know, people in the chest we do not know. This giraffe is looking more and more like ET. You know what? It's funny with the blue and the, and the, the, the snout reminds me of Homer Simpson a little bit. I love it. I love it. Well, and remember, you know, these things, get yourself a blow dryer or, or come back to a painting in stages after it's dried. It works way differently when you can do that. But you see now I'm kind of coming in with a little bit of the brush strokes to kind of give it a fur kind of feel. And, and, and that's in the highlight. And I think that's where the, a lot of the fun is, is in those, those little brush strokes. Yeah. So, so I will actually, I will just commit to this being an alien one. Because that's easier for me. I love it. Pale with style. And then I'm, I know that you were really helpful with, with putting the reference on screen. But every time anyone has typed anything into the chat, I don't see anything of the reference. So it's been sort of a, it's been less helpful than you'd think. So now that, that I know it's not a draft, I don't have to look at the reference anymore. So I'm free at last. All right. I will move the reference to, to free you. So you don't have five things between you and the painting anymore. Yeah, that will be one last thing. Let me see here. I guess it might, Donna says, she thinks it's, is it going to become a gouache monster now? Oh yeah. I'll call it an ink monster. So I have a very liberal understanding of ink. All right. Time to change the background color, which I knew I was going to do. I think everybody knew I was going to do eventually, but yeah, get this shape. I can actually, when you're saying change the background color, I can actually prepare to do that and use that as an opportunity to make it even more of an alien and less of a giraffe. Which color should I change my background into? Well, I won't say teal because it didn't work for me. I still don't quite know what teal is. Teal's a crapshoot with you, yeah. Pink. But, but, but I have so much pink in the art already. But yeah, we can try. Yeah. What I tend to do is I'll say, you know, is, is my painting predominantly dark and then I'll go with a light background. If my painting's predominantly light, I'll go with the dark background. But otherwise, I'll, yeah, try to find, it's, it's weird to find, you want to find something that's going to stand out, but also not add yet another color to it. I've been trying to keep my palette limited, but it's, I change the backgrounds on pretty much every single painting I do. I know. Thank you. And I thought I do my best copy of you and not only change the background color, but then add one of those white lines. Yeah, sure, I'll mess it up in a new way. Yeah, you know, a little bit of planning goes a long way and that's the one thing I never do, I never plan these things out. But I, you know, I, there's something about having all of these undertones and all of those, those other colors somewhere underneath the background that I think gives it more life. At least that's what I call myself. So this pink isn't working at all because it's red. Move it over there. Maybe if we go a completely different direction, we can go with green and do a very light green, then it will mix with the reddish thing, mix with the reddish and we'll make a salad. Yeah, that's fair. Wow, I can see your giraffe now. It's, it's even more terrifying than mine. Nothing but the best for you. I saved my A game for you. Yes, you certainly do. It is. I love it. It looks so happy. Thanks. That green is powerful. Oh yeah. This is probably my favorite color. I almost never work with it because green is so hard to work with. Yeah. But I just love like shock green. That is like wood green. Kermit the frog green, you know. Yeah. Green screen green, you know. Those guys who dress up as velociraptors in, you know, for Jurassic Park that, you know, we'll get just cut out of the movie. That's what I want my art to be. I want all my art to be like a man in a green screen suit. You can cut out, cut it out of your movie whenever you want. This little tiny bit of the background color coming through as well. It's good. Yeah. And then see if it works over the red. That's not completely dry. And then the genius trick behind using the white outline, like you always do, is that the bold white outline makes anything look intentional. Yes. I meant to do that. Yeah. That's what it says. That, which is a very neat trick. I do the same with, you know, whenever a drawing comes out a little bit more wonky than I like, I often go over my black outlines and make them thicker because then they seem more intentional. And then you accept all the wonk. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Someone is asking, what paint you're using? I am using Royal Talents gouache paint. So it's from the same brand as I'm as my ink. And I'm using it because, yes, I very much so. I'm using it because that's the brand my local art store has. And we used to have two local art stores. And now we only have one. Hmm. Which means I'm without a good supplier of the Pental color brushes, which is my favorite tool and my tool for concert drawing and all that stuff. Well, if you ever need to, because, you know, we order all our stuff from Blick, just let me know. Yeah. We can order stuff for you and just mail it off to you. Thank you. I'll keep it. Donna says, we can bring it when we come visit. Yes, you must come with visit. That would be so great. And I, you've painted me once. I have. Yes. And I want to paint you back, but I want to paint you back in real life. Oh, wow. So I think my autistic butt can sit still for how long? You think I need people to sit still? You know, I go to extreme metal concerts and that's draw people head banging while I'm head banging. That's true. You know, I'll be sitting still drawing rock trolls. So, you know, absolutely. That would be so great. You're right, Soapley. You're right. Soapley was already saying the same thing. He draws it. He draws a metal concert. You're nothing to him. Nothing. I actually drew someone during an interview not too long ago, like an interview on stage. And that was so much harder than a metal art, because, you know, they didn't sit very still, but this sat still enough that I could see how off my likeness was. But, you know, is sitting in a studio and giving you a sketch pad and or sitting outside in the woods. Yeah. And then you'll be still enough for me. I'll be still enough. Yeah. It would be so fun. It'd be so fun. We have to make that happen. Yeah. So this is one of those things where if I wasn't doing this for, you know, YouTube, I would say I'm about halfway through. Yeah. You know, like, like this is and it's fun, this rough, it really is. But there's so much that, you know, you can just sit and just kind of play around with. And I think that's where really the fun is. You can start to kind of play around with the brushstrokes, the texture, you know, the contrast and whatnot. I really admire people who do, you see those people who do speed oil paintings? Oh, yeah. Gosh, that's amazing. They just like no, no, no pencil drawing. They just, you know, throw a wash of color down and just start blocking in, you know, shapes. And, you know, like usually it's just like this, the cavernous shadows of where the underneath the eyebrows, you know, where the eyes would be and underneath the nose. And they just, it's amazing. Oh, yeah. That's I want to do more oil again. Oil portraits are and doing them like that without any sketching. Yeah. It's so fun and it's so hard. So in all of those who manage to do that. Yeah. And now we're going to steal the trick you just learned and put the black around the eyes. Oh, yeah. Kim Stiroff needs a spiked color. Maybe nose ring. We could do a nose ring. I don't think I could do a spiked color because that would reveal how bad I am at gouache. And now because of the white outline, it looks like it's intentional. So it looks good. Good is good is perhaps the wrong word, but it looks intentional. I think it's lovely. Of course you do. Of course you do. Can't trust you for a minute. I think our giraffes look beautiful together. There's something, you know, just pure, artistically speaking. This is the live where we're most online with each other's groove. We're in the groove together. I think it's a weird and kind of ugly groove, but I love this groove. I love how you're like, I'm just going to draw a giraffe out of my head. And then you're like, Oh, no, I'm going to use your art, your photo reference. And then you're like, no, it's not even a giraffe anymore. It's never too late to turn around. I think we got the full Kim Diaz home experience on this one. It's this. Now it's this. Now it's this. That's the most fun. That's the most fun. Yeah. Well, it was, I'll say this. It was nice, at least feeling for the first time doing a live with you that I wasn't swimming, you know, without any kind of life preserver. I was completely terrified. Next time we'll do another gouache live, but this time with a photo each, maybe the same photo. And then, then we'll do it like that. And I'll be swimming upstream without a life jacket again. And we'll give this giraffe a cool alien name. So he will be called from, I think that's correct, to cuts from leaf rank, planet leaf rank. I don't know where I get these names. Yeah, I just, it just comes to me. It just comes to natural, I guess. I'm so glad we did this. And I'm so sorry I've taken so long to do this. No, no, no, it's been, it's been, it's the weight makes it, oh, so much sweeter. And we've both been, we both have valid excuses. Yeah, yeah. Life has a way of doing that. And I'm learning to at least be more open about my own limitations. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of, it's not tried, but it's the way I was brought up, you know, you don't complain, you know, don't tell people what's going on, don't, don't tell people your secrets of your struggles and whatnot. But I think it's been good. I think it's been good for people to see that, you know, they're not alone. Yeah, we all struggle. Yeah. And for some of us, no problem is so small that you can't complain about it. So that's more where I'm at. I miss squash. I have not done enough squash lately. I thought you said you missed squash. And I was thinking the vegetable or the game? If you had to choose one, would you choose the vegetable or the game? I think I would choose the game, even though I've never played it. I just don't like the even the concept of squash. I thought you would have. I don't know why. I seem like the kind of person who has an irrational fear against squash. Oh, squash is great. Now, for the audience, after I'm finished with this, I'll go straight into releasing a new long form video about trolls again and about Theodor Kittelsen and Erik Werenscheul, the two artists responsible for the look of Norwegian trolls. And it's a 15 minute video. It's not a deep dive, but it's a deep enough dive. And so the plan is the second that we turn off this live, I will press publish and do the premiere for the troll video. And hopefully some of you are going to stay around for that. You know what I love about those premieres is they're kind of like a director's cut because you could you can ask questions, you know, while you're watching it. And I think those are fun. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I will. I will be sticking around and hopefully some people will ask me questions. I hope it didn't throw you under the bus and say, yeah, Kim will be there to answer all your I'm always there for the premieres. I think that's the whole point. Yeah, your response made me think I just you're like in a Oh, yeah, those are great. Yeah. The answering the questions. Yeah, I'm just perplexed by the idea of answering the questions because every video of mine answers every question. So all other questions are redundant. Yeah. Redundant redundant, as we say redundant. All right, I think I'm going to let this one go. I think I'm okay with it. And I think I absolutely love this one. Yours is brilliantly wonky. And they are a pair. It would be the painting of American Gothic. Oh, yeah, I was thinking that we could do those as American Gothic. Yeah, yours would have to work. Mine would be the wife. Actually, was it the wife or this? Is a sister actually? It's a sister. Yeah. I think that painting is in Chicago, right? We were Donna and I, we were talking about going to some of the museums and seeing some of the paintings we studied during the 60 days of studying the Masters and you've got to do that. Yeah. Did you do any Norwegian artists during your 60 days? Did you do Monk? I did Monk. Yes, because I was just about Yeah, we did the screen. He did several of those. He did them on cardboard, which was really, and I think that sunset that he was painting was an event, wasn't it? Was it like a volcanic event or something? Or it might have been during one of those where there's been a volcanic eruption and the sunset gets really red for a while. Yeah. Yeah. It might be. So if there are other Norwegian artists that I need to know about, let me know. There are other Norwegian artists. We have had up to more than a handful. We have three artists. You have Monk, you have Kittelsen, and you have Vär and Schoen. You have a lot of different Norwegian artists. I think you would get a kick out of Nikolaj Ostrup, same time as Monk, more or less, but he's less angsty. He has these fantastic mountains and rural scenes. They're sort of full of life. It's got a tiny bit of a cartoony quality to it. They're wonderful. I look forward to it. I think we're done. I think we're done, and it's been such a joy and a pleasure, and I hope that as many as possible stay around for a 15-minute video about trolls that will be starting soon. The second I can start it is also in less than a minute. In less than a minute. All right. Thank you again, Kim, for having me, and let's do it again very soon. Let us know. Looking forward to it already. All right. See you soon. Bye, everybody.