Stuart Thomson: Workshop Bursary Blog
Stuart Thomson is one of Gaada’s 2022/23 Workshop Bursary recpients. Below Stuart shares how he used the A.I. image generation tool, Dall-e, to produce a zine exploring text prompts and emerging images in the style of Harry Clarke. It's been an intriguing journey to witness Stuart's experimentation with this technology as it’s landed here in the Toogs Artist Workshop, and we're excited to read his reflections on the experience…
It was my girlfriend’s idea that I applied for the workshop bursary. I’d initially thought that I probably wasn’t the type of person who should be applying for something like this – I was too out of practice maybe, not professional enough maybe, or maybe the things I was interested in were too weird, but I couldn’t be happier that she convinced me, and couldn’t be more wrong about how at home I felt throughout the process.
I arrived on the first day with some idea of the kinds of things I was interested in making, but not much idea of what would be possible, or what facilities Gaada had available. Daniel took the time to show me everything in the workshop and explain how it all worked. I had a go drawing on the iPad and we made a few riso prints of the octopus I sketched. Talking to Daniel made me feel more comfortable that the direction I was interested in wasn’t too weird!
By the next workshop day I had more of a settled idea what I wanted to work on; I’m interested in the iconography of Christianity, as well as horror (both horror films and stories) so I decided to fuse both of these interests together and create a ‘legendary‘ of scary imaginary saints. I’ve also always been interested in the ability of technology to create art, and particularly to randomly generate it. I now work in the AI field, but one of the very first things I did when I learned to code was to write a program to randomly generate sentences. I used the Open AI’s DALL-E system to generate some scary looking saints and took them into the workshop.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to use these images, but I did find them very compelling. After speaking to Daniel, we decided that it would be interesting to print them as-is, and include the text prompt used to generate them. The juxtaposition of new-and old really appealed to me, and the uncanny nature of the generated images really added to the horror element. The team at Gaada were really good at making me feel confident to just start making something - I tend to overthink these things - but we got stuck in on the second session outlining this booklet. We ended up deciding to print the pages on bible paper and Jono helped me lay out the pages. We mocked up a logo for the project and I started sketching a saint for the front cover.
Over the next couple of sessions, we finalised some details (number of saints to include etc.) and worked on printing, cutting, folding, the pages. This was slightly fiddly to do given our choice of paper, but Daniel and Jono helped me through the various processes.
By the final session we had settled on using gold hot-foil on a leather-look black paper for the cover. I couldn’t be happier with the result! Foiling the covers was probably the most enjoyable experience of the whole bursary; it’s an incredibly satisfying process and was the moment I really felt that I had created something beautiful. I’m so grateful for the support I received during the bursary, both in terms of work put in by both Jono and Daniel (that bible paper wasn’t the easiest to work with!) and the space and encouragement from the team to focus on making something I’m proud of.