Process Video: 2010

Stan!'s homage to the 2010 Monster Vault captured in a step-by-step process video, an exclusive benefit for paid subscribers

As much fun as fans tell me these process videos are for them, I find them just as intriguing. They’re the closest thing I can get to watching myself work, and they sometimes give me insights into my own thought and artistic process that can only be pieced together from an outside, looking over the shoulder perspective.

While this is absolutely an homage to Steve Prescott and his amazing work for D&D and Magic: the Gathering, as I watched the pencils pop to life on the screen and eventually transform into “inked” line art, I saw another artist’s influence, too. I clearly see that this piece owes a lot to the comic book art (and particularly, the 1970s Marvel Comics cover drawings) of Gil Kane.

I have no idea if Steve is a fan of Gil Kane (or even if he's particularly aware of him). And I’m not even sure that I see that influence in Steve’s painting itself … but it’s for sure there in my drawing (though not intentionally). That’s how artistic influence works … we absorb the things we like from the artists who inspire us, whose work we pored over in our formative years (and beyond), and they become PART of our own artistic process. And then echoes of them come floating up when we least expect them.

That’s also a distinct difference between what a human artist does and what generative A.I. does. The machine “creativity” involved lifting actual sections from pieces it has “learned” from and melding them together into new forms … that’s why you get those bizarre “artifacts” like too many fingers or hands that don’t work correctly. No human artist would make those mistakes. We aren’t literally taking slices of art we admire and applying it to our new drawings … we’re pulling from the essence, the feeling of what the artist has done and we’re learning lessons and retaining perspectives that we can then use as a filter to process our own work.

Subscribers to this newsletter got to see this drawing early, whereas the general public are only just getting their first glimpses of it today. But there’s still something left that’s JUST for the paid subscribers—a process video showing the step-by-step creation of this cartoon homage. (If you’re currently a free subscriber, now would be a great time to upgrade.)