This is one of the largest barriers facing artists who want to use generative A.I in their actual workflows. It’s all very well to type prompts into Stable Diffusion or MidJourney and get amazingly beautiful images spat out at us, but if that image doesn’t represent a true realization of what we’re seeing in our mind’s eye, and, more importantly, what we want to communicate to our audiences, then it’s all so much piss in the wind.

The main problem is that generative A.I has mostly been presented to us as a toy. You press a button and pretty pictures pop out. But that’s not how actual artists work. We go through a process of conceptualization from project scoping to mood-boarding, to sketch, to lineart, to coloring, and beyond.

What I present here is a very quick and dirty attempt to create a workflow that uses A.I and other aritst assist tools to either massively speed up the process of character art creation, or else to help plug gaps in skills portfolio required for that process.