GM ~ All weekend I was grinding AI training for fun + profit, using my paintings to build models that feel like my paintings. Infinite paintings unlocked. Friday I dropped the Liquid Glitch: Renaissance model on By Sat/Sun I was deep in crafting a new, still unnamed, collage style pulling Bimbocore maximalist meme prompts + fusing them with my painting moodboard.
I was bouncing between microsoft copilot, midjourney, title.xyz and a little bit of grok (image generation there I'm still not really feeling but it's super helpful in research and conceptualization) to make bimbocore maximalist memes just to see if models knew what bimbocore is because to me it's like I just assume everyone knows, but it turns out not all of the internet is familiar with it so not all models even are able to make it. Weirdly enough microsoft copilot scored top in pure bimbocore generation.
I documented the whole progression on Zora + Rodeo as coins to also see if people even liked it, because even if people are willing to buy a coin of a post posting at high volume, then I assume overall people who like my stuff will also like prints and merch made in this style which combines a lot but also I didn't want to just regurgate this niche meme culture I love and come from, I wanted to make it Empress Trash.
That's when I had the idea to as Microsoft CoPilot for a prompt based off my favorite bimbocore memes we made together to put in midjourney to continue the work specifically to blend with the moodboards I have in midjourney that are trained on my digital and physical paintings ~ mixing my fav trashy meme culture with my decades of classical art training captured in my brushstrokes fed into AI (not to be extra but that's what it is plain facts lol).
I want to note why all this is so important to me as an artist and human so get ready for the emotional shit. I have a hard time painting now for a while because my right side neck/shoulder is fucked from compounding early childhood (untreated then) traumas and more as an adult along with repetive stress of being a painter and I was a barista for years along with other physical labor to get by as a poor trying to be an artist and do the hustle. I can paint but to do so professionally like I was pre-covid is almost impossible rn. I'm doing everything I can to rehab and manage pain besides surgery, which maybe an inevitable at this point, but I still need to create and push forward my career until I have the resources and time to explore surgery as an option. For now as long as I wear my brace, do my stretches and exercises, and overall don't act an idiot, I can get my day to day tasks done, pain overall keeps decreasing even if I have spiked moments and just need to not push myself so hard.
This is why I've been so hyper focused on this AI training project and took the time to put my paintings into an ai mood board and keep training different styles off of it as a genesis base. Painting is my passion like on a soul level and to not paint is a grief that is so hard to describe that compounds with all the other grief I have to deal with in life from personal and world circumstances. To create works that I look at and can see my hand in it even if it's created by ai, it helps me on levels I can't explain and makes me cry just trying to type about it.
Since a lot of this pain stems from abuse at the hands of others, people who hurt me deeply in ways I won't get into that trauma dump but ultimately they hated me (or any women) expressing myself in anyway and wanted to control me, and now that those people are not in my life and some abusers are even dead (like my mom and other family), the effects of what they did to me still impact my body to this day in what feels like such a personal battle with my own body and with their ghost hands on my body with what they did to me because they didn't want me to express myself and create as a woman in the first place. The anger I deal with this is extreme, and not trying to compete but I don't think most people could handle it becasue I have big emotions as is, because also that anger makes me suffer more overall when I can't conduit it through painting which is why I paint to manage my anger about being hurt in the first place. This is the important part because with each model I create based off my paintings and each painting I generate from it, the anger goes down just a little bit more and overall I suffer less as if I'm the one painting it because it is trained on my brushstrokes and hand so my energy is in it.
(And before anyone gives me unsolicited medical advice, please note I have been dealing with this a long time and have gone to many professionals about this and I don't even want to get into that because it's a whole other thing about how shit the US health care system is if you are poor and also there is only so much they can do and there is some things that are just lifelong issues because abuse and trauma do that.)
This is suppose to be what art does and why it's so sacred because it literally can heal. This is healing for me not just on a personal level, but knowing other people can create from my models heals on another level knowing even if like I fall over dead today (which I hope doesn't happen) I know all I worked for in life in training myself as a painter, I have trained at least one AI (I hope to train more) to allow others to create from it in a permissionless but attributed way, planting the seed of a legacy that goes way beyond me, that has my brushstrokes in it.
For those not familiar with art history, all the old master's mostly ran painting studios. There was no way to create a painting back then without a whole workshop cause it was so labor intensive. The term master's stroke came from this, because what they would do after inspecting the piece the master would do the final touches on it to bring it to their level of refinement because their lifetime of training and experience pushed their technical skills beyond even a whole warehouse of people reaffirming their master status. Like samurai's with paint brushes ~ yes ninja turtles got it. I feel very similar about AI with this, because I have given the machine my master strokes and I can take it even further by finishing the pieces to a point of my refinement not just raw ai generations pushing myself further as an artist and reaffirming each time my master level of art vs a machine while still cooperating with it.
Along with that I have been using Midjourney since v2, so I feel deep at it's core Midjourney models just understand me and we have grown together in this way. I love how I can develop refined styles in Midjourney and then make a model in titles ~ like I did with the Liquid Glitch: Renaissance model I crafted from my paintings, liquid glitch model I trained, and some renaissance prompting to elevate it to the old master level. I spent many years studying old master's works and felt for the ai model to fully understand me as an artist it too should incorporate that prompting.
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A little reset from writing about emotional things and now the business stuff: With two polished Titles models and custom profiles in Midjourney, a massive portfolio of digital works, endless creative drive enabled by AI, and all the infrastructure and tools built out in crypto and beyond, I can now pivot to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive Shopify store. This store will include but not limited to digital art, prints, merch, fashion, metaverse builds, dev work, streaming, works from my collection (other artists) etc etc as my central artist portal for everything Empress Trash: chaos rooted in glitch that flips hierarchies with trauma alchemy, slut positive + bimbo coded destigmatization + deeply intentional to celebrate autonomy, beauty, and power of feminity in all it's forms. (lfg)
I used to work ecommerce so applying those skills to building out my commercial artistic identity more I think is a great direction for me to go in while staying true to my story and core values as I grow. I think as a woman in a historical context and with government granted rights erroding so quickly, exercising our freedom to transact is paramount in this time and space as much as exercising our freedom of speech which is the cornerstone of all human rights. These core values are why I ride with crypto so hard and will keep going through good and bad creating and building with new technologies.
As Thoreau said, "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." I think really applies to how I feel where I'm at right now in my process.
EDIT:
Reading this I realized ozzy osbourne's death directly impacted me to do this because when I collaborated with crypto batz I created bimbo groupie bats and I started on the bimbocore I realize now to cope with his death.
Here are the bats I made:
Bless Ozzy's ghost for this ❤️ He truly is a saint.
~~
Thank you for taking the time to read my words -- <3
Until next time, stay real and curious
Empress Trash 🖤
my work on titles where you can create from the models:
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