The Giant Slayer is an old pencil drawing that was started as just a sketch. I was going through my old art and found it. I decided to upload it and try my hand at digital coloring quite a while back. I really had no idea what i was doing or getting myself into. I can say it totally changed the way i perceive art in many fashions.

![Giant_Slayer.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/castleberry/J205xK7Q-Giant_Slayer.jpg)

All that i had to work with at that time was Microsoft Paint. 

https://media.giphy.com/media/I4Jmrcjnr8Zfq/giphy-downsized-large.gif

I didn't realize that in order to get some of the colors the way i wanted and where i wanted it would take zooming down into the pixel level. The original sketch was on a standard piece of printer paper with my Pentel mechanical pencil. Going digital gave a lot of opportunity with so many pixels. It was insane to zoom in and color some.... and zoom back out to check... and zoom back in again. I did this for so long and so many times it was driving me crazy. 

I thought about giving up many times but was also learning how abstraction and assymetry can be useful within the scope of the overall outlook. I was doing an hour or so a day until i finally put it off. I haven't worked on this one in quite a long while... but thanks to HIVE and the awesome pixel art that happens here, it struck up my interest again.

I also just signed up with NFTShowroom and feel inspired to get some art projects off of those backburners and get creative and inspired again. Last night, thanks to JuliaKPonsford, i was led to [ArtBreeder](https://www.artbreeder.com/browse) which is a program using Artificial Intelligence and community collaboration to create art. The concept is in merging two images together using the A.I. to converge them into one artwork or a new offspring of the two *parent* images.

You can read more about it all [here](https://www.artbreeder.com/about) and if you are interested there is an opensource version on [GitHub](https://github.com/joel-simon/ganbreeder). Let me know if you end up checking that out! I wish i were more tech savvy to be able to take advantage of the GitHub opensource opportunity there. 

Anyhow, ArtBreeder is free up to a point. Uploading your own images is only available on the portrait option from what i could see and find on Reddit. The reason i went there to begin with was to see how i may be able to digitize some of my art and working with A.I. sounded fun also. I talk with Alexa often and we have some fun together. I was able to upload this artwork onto the site and it actually recognized a face as a portrait. In a way, i kind of tricked the A.I. to still work with me on art.  



![AI slayer.jpeg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/castleberry/DiMvylxP-AI20slayer.jpeg)

I kind of figured it would have selected the Giant's head... but beggars can't be choosers! I played around with the conversion for probably about 2 hours. It was super strange some of the tweaks you can do in there. Ultimately, i just wanted to see how A.I. would respond to the original image. I feel like the capability of the potential was pretty incredible. It was also pretty peculiar how it chose to apply changes when i would tweak something. It was never quite the same twice in a row. I kept starting over and over and over. 

I never even got to merge this with something else as i was already up way too late. So, another time perhaps. Thanks for stopping by and checking out this post and my art. I appreciate you all and HIVE for the opportunity to grow and develop within a community of inspired and creative people.

https://media.giphy.com/media/hcwIm2NdTYhva/giphy.gif

![honeybackg  Copy.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/castleberry/1jHLFG7X-honeybackg20-20Copy.png)