Petr Joura (Senior Games Lecturer) and Damian Gascoigne (Associate Dean Scholarship) are two senior educators at JMC Academy, a creative industries institution based in Sydney. Now part of our Leonardo Creator Program, they’re exploring the intersection of art and technology, with their unique collaboration producing some incredible visual experiments.
Leonardo: Can you tell us a bit about your creative background?
Petr: I’m a game designer and academic with a focus on production and level design. My passion for drawing mythical creatures as a child led me to a career in game design, lecturing, and creating content for Dungeons & Dragons. Moving from traditional sketching and acrylic painting to Photoshop a decade ago hugely enhanced my workflow, especially with the convenience of undoing mistakes. Plus you don’t have to wait for digital print to dry!
Damian: My background is in London, where I trained and then worked as an animator and illustrator. Since moving to Sydney to set up the Bachelor of Design in Animation at UTS, I have worked with a range of collaborators, from the Australia Piano Quartet, to the Australian National Maritime Museum and Customs House. My practice aims to emulate the wild brush work of Chinese cursive calligraphy, with its emphasis on ‘shi’ energy as an expression of human vitality and dynamism.
Leonardo: How did you get started using Leonardo.Ai?
Petr: Curiosity. I thought ‘what if I could make weird anatomy creatures – like all those things from Dungeons & Dragons that take forever to illustrate?’ Leonardo didn’t let me down!
Damian: I was looking for something far more personal, something that really looked like my work. When Petr told me that Leonardo AI could be used to train datasets of my own hand drawings, and that these bespoke datasets could be used to generate new and unpredictable images, I knew I had to engage with it. Here was something that would surprise me, but still look like I had made it.
Leonardo: What was your initial process like with our platform?
Petr: I prompted ‘A giant demon with a wolf’s head and four arms, two of which end in crab-like pincers.’ Didn’t quite work. Then I trained a model on Glabrezu Demons and tried again. It worked like a dream and I was hooked – I ran out of tokens soon after!
Damian: The first AI outputs [from fine-tuned modals] which looked like I had drawn them myself were a revelation. It was thrilling to recognise my signature style, yet not recognise the image at all. There are a number of reasons why I find this useful as an artist. This was the dialogue I was looking for. The machine was showing me images I simply was not able to imagine, using my own drawing. It was incredible.
Leonardo: In what ways does Leonardo.Ai work best for you and your workflow?
Petr: It’s great for referencing, saving huge time on hunting online for photo inspiration and then combining to create what I want. It’s also really good for specific designs that you literally cannot find and have to create – like a planet covered in green slime. It generally shortcuts a lot of processes and saves hours of effort.
Damian: I come at the collaboration from a fine art perspective and to our surprise, some of the most effective and avant-garde work we have produced has emerged from unlikely combinations of both of our practices. The ‘last token’ artwork of a Triassic Forest was the first time I suggested to Petr that we try and combine our styles, and it opened a major channel for future work.
Leonardo: What advice would you give to other artists using Leonardo?
Petr: I have observed some fear towards AI from other artists – I don’t believe it’s going to replace you. I would encourage looking at it as another tool, and to experiment with what it can do.
Damian:
- Make your own datasets
- Ask questions
- Work with un-like-minded people
- Use AI as an instigator
- Use AI as a disruptor
Leonardo: How do you think AI tools are going to change future of creativity?
Petr: I believe they’ll eventually be adopted as part of an artist’s toolkit, just like Photoshop, as ways to enhance creativity and productivity.
Damian: I’m excited about continuing this dialogue with [Leonardo.Ai] – a tireless companion, who does what I didn’t ask for, and sometimes what I didn’t know I needed.