=OvO=

The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and it was the kind of question she tried to avoid.

Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.

“You a cop?”

The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”

A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.

Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”

A nod.

“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”

A nod.

“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”

A tiny, miserable nod.

“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’

“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”

Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.

The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.

“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”

The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.

I was expecting a like a Chart or two, maybe some written instructions. not Seventy Seven full color pages for One type of rose.

she has also made a website since the first post (link) the patterns are cheaper there and the payment is handled through PayPal (and I'm guessing she gets a Way bigger cut of the money than with her Etsy so maybe check out the site instead) of the Etsy listed above.

also quick faq below the cut bc idk, supporting small businesses ran by WOC is important and this lady is rad. I just genuinely love her products and want more people to know about them.

With pictures!

This is going to REVOLUTIONIZE redstone

Also

tomm moore isn’t being an asshole in his reply (or inherently ableist, as some of the notes on this post claim based on his response). he’s reacting to someone asking ‘what words should i use in my midjourney text prompt to steal the art style of this person specifically?’ and he has every right to be pissed. he’s actually a lot more polite and charitable than the op deserves imo.

ai art isn’t art, it’s job automation. it’s certainly not ‘democratizing art’, as some have claimed. artists are worried that they might be pushed out of their profession by computer programs that 1. steal their art to use as training material because the business/dev end are taking advantage of legal loopholes to collect and use said art; and 2. that a computer program might generate in seconds something close to what it might take a trained, hard-working, talented human artist days or weeks to create. so you might put your freely generated renaissance banana cat on a t-shirt and sell it for profit while artists are no longer able to financially sustain themselves.

here’s a good introductory video to the whole ‘is ai art real art’ debate, and another one debunking some major arguments in favor of ai image-generating programs. ai-generated images will improve more and more (they already have at a frankly terrifying pace - remember the wonky disturbing images going around in like early 2022? they’re winning art contests against humans now). but for the moment the basic way to figure out if an image is ai-generated is to look at small details. these images look good from a distance or when you look at them as a whole. once you start really looking you’re gonna notice things like disembodied floating hands, dead eyes and fabric patterns that just don’t make sense. but that will likely change too, and soon.

One week later when I post the finished project: