I An
wasn’t supposed to be an artist.
Accidental Artist KEN LONG
And for most of my life, I wasn’t. Oh, I had made some art in school, just like you. But my kindergarten teacher sent a note home to my parents because the violent nature of my army battle pictures was a cause for concern. And in junior high, the superhero parody comics I drew in the back of the class, when I should have been taking notes, were sometimes confiscated. That accounted for most of my art experience for the first sixty-plus years of my life. I had no formal art training beyond eighth grade and never took an art appreciation class. I wasn’t supposed to be an artist. And then I was. It happened slowly, a few years after digital cameras came out. I bought a Canon point-and-shoot camera with zoom. Suddenly, I could take photos and see what I had taken without having to wait for prints to be developed, and then I could share the photos electronically. Easy-to-use editing software also became available at the same time. I sometimes supersaturated the photos I took to make the colors pop and give the image a painting-like quality. I posted some of these on Facebook and got positive feedback on them from friends and family. A few years later, the first publicly available “deep dream” neural net software was introduced. This enabled me to combine a photo I took (the base image) with a second image (the style image) to create a composite of the two that was a new beast entirely. A few examples of this accompany this article. When I began to post these processed images on Facebook, I got even more positive feedback and then, surprisingly, requests to buy them. This eventually led me to create my own small business, River PhotoCraft, which today generates annual revenue in the thousands. I wasn’t supposed to be an artist, and maybe you weren’t either.
After the rain 8
