Screw AI ‘art’, I’ll paint my own!

Aug 7

Exciting news - I’m starting a podcast!! It’s called Blooming with Pride:

It’s a deeply human interview podcast with Queer entrepreneurs, creatives, and community organizers; learning about their personal and professional journeys. The aim is to meet with them on a personal level, and have them share their stories to help inspire other queer people to chase their own dreams. I’m super excited, I love to yap with people, and I love cheerleading and highlighting other peoples’ successes!

As I was researching podcast hosting platforms, I was shocked (but not surprised) to see the level of AI ‘art’ in the recent podcast releases. As y’all well know by this point, that’s antithetical to how I want to conduct my business. I wanted to come up with a design that would stand out as colorful and clearly made by a human. The Kiwifruit Coaching logo was drawn digitally by my best friend Kayden based on a rough sketch I provided, but I couldn’t think how to communicate what I wanted with this cover art. I didn’t have a clear idea until I thought about potentially painting it myself, then it alllll came together. “Blooming with Pride… what about a field of rainbow flowers?!”

I’ve previously painted a few pet portraits and some landscape art with Hannah, I’m really proud of how they turned out, but always with the internal caveat of “I followed a Paint and Sip tutorial” - like that somehow disqualified my artistic abilities. Why should it? I’m still painting! I’m still the one creating the end product. I worked hard to tell my internal critics to shut the fuck up, please, and allow me to just create.

So I found a great Youtube tutorial and put brush to canvas! Here’s some in progress shots, I followed the tutorial to get the base down, then I went off book for all of the flowers the next day. I went pretty HAM for 4 hours doing the flowers so I didn’t get many in progress pictures of those.

I got to smear paint with a trowel! That was a fun new experience.

The hardest part was getting the colors on the flowers to pop, while painting on a green background. I learned about layering, I used a really light daisy yellow on the sunflowers, followed by a bright yellow coat on top. I used a similar technique for the orange flowers.

One little detail that I love, is that this painting features multiple tall poppies. Nobody’s cutting them down to size on my watch.

I’ll keep you updated on the podcast progress! I have the first batch of interviewees lined up and I’m going to get a backlog going before I start releasing episodes, I will be promoting guest spots and affordable ads for the community closer to release!