Fairies, I'm so sorry to keep you all waiting so long for new wings!
These wings are all ready to ship, and will list on Tuesday Aug. 25 at 8pm PDT.
Sorta long update ahead with sale info, and my statement about gen AI use in the wing making world.
I'll have 2 painted sets this time, one is the Angeline wings in bold purples & blacks with touches of pink and teal laminated with the Diamond Fire film and black veins (above). They will be $459 plus shipping.
The other painted set is the Elora design again, below, this time with a sort of deep teal / blue as the main color with purple & fuchsia accents on the Ultraviolet film with black veins. They will be $449 plus shipping.
Then there's the Verena design in clear Diamond Fire with black veins, which will be $235 plus shipping.
I’ll also have the Elora in clear Opal with gold veins for $259 plus shipping (below).
I might also have a repeat set of Lyra or Lilian designs as well.
They will be listing on Tuesday, August 25 at 8pm PDT, and as always will be on my Flash Sale page here: https://fancy-fairy-wings-things.myshopify.com/collections/flash-sales
Remember, they won't show up until the start time.
I've also finally found a way to record all my brush strokes in Photoshop in the background just like Procreate does! It's an extension called PixelRec Pro. I usually forget to record any of my painting because I'm just focused on getting the work done, and with a screen record there's so much dead time in there while I'm sitting staring at the screen trying to decide where the next color goes or whether I like what I just put down. This way I don't have to be so focused on recording and it only records actual activity. I didn't find out about it until I had already gotten some painting done, but I wasn't totally happy with it so this video below shows where I started re-doing it all the way to finished. The beginning shows the brush stroke re-play of my sketch for this wing design in Procreate on my iPad. I took video from my phone so I could also show you I don't have any hidden layers I'm tracing, since I know Procreate has that function in its brush stroke replay videos. Photoshop and PixelRec do not.
Process video showing the Angeline fairy wings being designed and painted
No part of my wings are gen AI!
I really want to make it crystal clear that I am not using gen AI for my work at all.
There's some wing makers who use it openly (at least in the Etsy listings they disclose it), like moon.moth.wings, and others who certainly seem to use it and have many people in the comments asking if gen AI was used or flat out accusing them of it with no replies disputing that from the artist, like Fairykill_Creations.
I've seen many also now printing either existing butterfly / insect wing photos, clipart stock, and what I'm pretty certain are gen AI designs on clear plastic with wires glued on the upper edge of the panels, such as thewingsua, who also was selling copies of my Titania wings without permission before I reported them on Etsy.
That's a common trajectory, to at first only fabricate wings using nature images, purchased images or stolen ones printed on either fabric or plastic, until gen AI came out and then all of a sudden their style completely changed, with super detailed 3D looking art on them after gen AI image tools such as MidJourney came out in 2022.
Then there's a whole other crop of wing makers now who are using cut files sold by ATP Textures, who was called out in the last couple years by other wing makers for allegedly copying their designs, which is why you may be seeing many different new wing shops selling the same looking wings. They also use gen AI for some of their digital products, so I'm assuming they might also be using it for their digital wing designs they sell too.
Though I experimented with gen AI early on it was only for fun before I knew about the extent of water usage & artist exploitation, to test it to see if it was reproducing my work for legal purposes, and to see for myself how it actually works as well as how to recognize it if I see it, since the AI detectors are sadly not accurate enough. They too often provide false positive results, which can be really damaging to legitimate human artists’ livelihood.
I wish it had stopped evolving before it got too good at creating photo realistic results, before companies started laying off workers in favor of using gen AI instead. If it had stayed weird & funky with obvious defects like extra fingers & hair merging with clothing, it wouldn’t be as problematic & disruptive to the market as it is now. Not to mention, the rapid expansion of AI data centers producing awful noise and pollution especially in marginalized communities
There’s a lot I could say, about areas of nuance and my criticisms of some of the staunchest anti-AI activists & the way they sometimes cause harm when publicly ‘witch hunting’ people they think are using AI without allowing for the possibility that they got it wrong, but this blog post would be miles long.
Bottom line, I've always taken pride in creating my own original, human made unique fairy wing designs since 2003 (I made my 1st set for myself in the 1990’s) and I plan to keep it that way. As far as I know I was the first to put iridescent wings with cut metal vein structures on the market as well as the first to come out with convertible versions of them.
One last thing, I'm so sorry I didn't post about the light up and crystal encrusted Titania wings I made recently for an order, I was stressing about other things going on in my life that I forgot. But I've posted a video of them on Insta and FB if you'd like to see:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db1bpUTSX_Y/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsi=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
I may make a separate post about those sometime.