As mentioned earlier, one of my creative goals for 2024 is to create at least 52 AI assisted/inspired artworks this year, (using AI-generated images as a prompt for actual physical creative pieces). My latest piece was for a commissioned artwork, of a wedding woodcut. The customer had seen my previous wedding heart papercut, but wanted a wooden heart instead of paper.
I suppose I could have just used the same design as the papercut…
…but this seemed like a great opportunity to ask an AI to help me with a new design. This time I used ChatGPT / DALL-E. Here is the first prompt (I’m still in the habit of using “please” and “thank you” with the AI):
“please could you create a design for a heart-shaped piece of wooden wall art for a wedding? The wooden object should feature the names “Charlie & Bex.”
and this was the result:
Wow.
It was a lovely design, but it didn’t really scream ‘wedding’ at me, so I followed up with “Please could you try the same design, but with the design cut out using a fretsaw or scrollsaw (instead of carved into the wood)?” This is what came out next:
Wow again. For a start I was impressed that Dall-E actually knew what I meant by fretsaw or scrollsaw! But it still needed to be a bit more wedding-y (and what the heck was that “CERDDING” about?!)
This is why I really like the collaborative aspect of ChatGPT’s Dall-E. Having the interaction as a conversation allows the user to tweak the design in an iterative way, just changing one or two parts of the prompt at a time, instead of having to type out a giant long prompt with all of the required elements of the design. I felt that the second design still looked a bit too flowery, so I asked it to replace the large flowers with doves. Here is the result:
Fibber!
Again, that was a really nice design, but one of the things I’d liked about the previous versions was that the design had included a small blank heart near the bottom, which I thought would be a great place to write the date of the actual wedding. So I asked Dall-E to insert a small blank heart near the bottom.
Dall-E replied “Here’s the updated design with a small blank heart near the bottom, providing space for you to add text later.“
– but that was a big fat fib! Unfortunately, although ChatGPT / Dall-E is fantastic in a lot of ways, it often falsely claims that it has done what I asked. I actually really liked that design, but because it wasn’t 100% perfect I persevered and asked it to include roses or passion flowers. Again, it came up with a lovely design…
…but again it wasn’t quite right. I loved the birds and the overall look and the little banner with the names in, but there were a couple of problems:
- There still wasn’t a blank heart for me to add a date later
- Some of the lines were getting a bit too fine to cut out
- I didn’t really like the big flower in the middle
Getting somewhere…
So I tried again, with this prompt: “Create a design for a heart-shaped piece of wooden wall art for a wedding, which looks like it has been cut out by a fretsaw or scrollsaw. The wooden object should feature: the names “Charlie & Bex”, two doves, a simplified passion flower, and a small heart-shaped area left blank for text.“
This time the GPT had done exactly what I asked…except that I’d changed my mind about putting in a lotus flower.
“Nice! Can you try another design like the one on the left, but with a rose or calla lily instead of the lotus flower?”
Frustration
This is where I started to get frustrated. I’d thought that the next image was going to be perfect, but it was getting worse. It had inserted a passion flower instead of a rose, had mis-spelled Charlie, and changed the doves into seagulls. Sigh. At the moment (April 2024) there always seems to be a point where the GPT turns into a complete arse, and deliberately does stuff to annoy me. We went through about twenty more iterations after that, where it was creating very nice designs, but they weren’t actually what I’d asked for. I swear it was deliberately ignoring my instructions.
After several days of fighting with DALL-E on and off, it finally created a design that I thought could work as a lasercut piece:
This fit the brief in most ways:
- Heart shape wedding woodcut
- Rose
- Two doves
- Correct names in a banner
- Infinity symbol
- Small blank heart (although it was too small to incorporate any text)
- Looked like it had been (or could be) cut with a fretsaw or scrollsaw
Final Design
I made a few tweaks to the final design, by:
- Making sure all of the elements connected to at least one other element, so no pieces dropped out.
- Simplifying and/or thickening the swirling lines of the designs, to make the final piece less fragile.
- Swapping the doves for two others from an earlier version.
- Converting the squiggle above the heart-and-infinity-sign into a “CB” monogram.
- Changing the typeface of the names.
- Enlarging the blank heart so I could add text to it.
- Changing the decorative edge to a repeating “C&B” design.
- Adding a hanging loop.
- Altering the squiggles above the rose so that they formed another heart.
Here they are next to each other:
I do love the original, but it just wasn’t practical to cut out exactly as it was (e.g. with some lines being too thin, and some elements not connected to the rest of the design). I might try etching it rather than cutting it, just so I have a version that’s more faithful to the original, but on the whole I’m really pleased with the way the wedding woodcut turned out.
The only real improvement that I feel I made is that I joined the top parts of the heart (above the infinity symbol). Most of the other changes were just compromises, to join up the disconnected or thin sections.
Lessons learned
- ChatGPT / DALL-E is awesome. I can’t believe how aesthetically pleasing most of those designs are.
- From a technical point of view, I’ve learned how to create ‘masked’ sections of images via the Linearity Curve app (i.e. sections of the design I can isolate, then copy and paste and/or export into other applications).
Things I still need to learn or improve
- Why does it do that thing where it starts ignoring parts of my prompts? I need to try to find out if there’s a way to stop that happening.
Homework:
- Try to create a specialist ‘Wedding Woodcut’ GPT, so I can design similar wedding hearts in the future.
Summary:
I felt like this was a really successful project. DALL-E helped me to create a design which combined the look of a traditional woodcut with the modern technology of lasercutting and AI image generation.
Thanks for reading this ‘Wedding Woodcut’ post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts or products – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-generated images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.