Blogging the book: resisting second hand thought

Attempting my own illustrations and saying hell no to AI.

As I’m sure everyone who is reading this knows by now, I’m deep in the process of writing my book on marquetry for Lost Art Press.

Writing this one has been much more enjoyable than my previous book, something I mostly attribute to the amount of control I have now. I find myself thinking really long and hard about exactly what it is I want to do with the project.

I’ve also been spending the past week on my Instagram re-sharing old videos I’ve made to get me in the zone, and I have to say I’m finding myself surprised at how much I’ve been able to convey. I didn’t realize just how much work I’ve already done on this whole subject, which is a little silly considering I wrote an entire primer on it earlier this year.

Shifting focus

After compiling many thousands of words over the past few weeks, I’ve now turned my attention to the illustrations. When I originally signed the contract for the book, I had envisioned hiring an illustrator to handle all that. But my editor (Megan Fitzpatrick) suggested I give it a go myself.

Writing a book is a weird thing. It takes an incredible amount of work, time, and skill to pull off. It’s a painful process of writing, editing, re-writing, taking photos, re-writing, editing more, and then doubting yourself at the end. Driving for Uber is a much more financially lucrative use of time and I'm not kidding in the slightest when I say that.

But I’m writing this book regardless and feel incredibly privileged to have the chance to do so. Money is a means to an end and for now those ends are taken care of — more would be nice but that’s not my goal here. Instead, I have an extremely well-regarded publisher willing to bring a project that I create to market, and they’re letting me do it the way I want to do it.

So in my mind, this is my chance to do my thing. This may be the only time I’m ever given the backing to do something so personal and bring it into the world. I think that’s a pretty big freaking deal, and something that I realize happens for very few people. I’m not going to screw it up.

I figured that I may as well give the illustrations a go myself, if only because I know what I want and what they need to convey. If I can figure out a way to make them coherent and attractive, then I’m good to go.

Avoiding the shortcut

I’ll get into the process for how I’ve been approaching things below the paywall, but there’s something worth addressing here. I was speaking with a friend about writing the book and my need for illustrations, and I explained to them that I wanted everything to have a hand drawn look. They suggested that I possibly look into using AI to do that.

That’s not going to happen. The entire purpose of doing this book is to have something that is documented proof of the things I’ve learned. It’s the culmination of many years of countless hours of work, experimentation, teaching, and research. The thought of relying on what I view as a plagiarism machine to assist with that process is revolting. This is my project and I fully intend to keep it that way.

There seems to be this strain of thought recently where certain people believe that since they are able to “use the AI good,” they are somehow creating something. I couldn’t disagree with this sentiment more, and I think using AI particularly for artistic endeavors kind of defeats the entire point of being human. I’ve seen these people referred to as “second hand thinkers,” a phrase that has been stuck in my head all week. It’s perfect.

I will not subject my readers to second hand thought passed off as my own. To me it’s literally no different than straight up plagiarism.

Please don’t misinterpret this as my thinking I deserve praise here. I absolutely don’t. It kind of irritates me that I have to even say that I won’t use AI, but the entire world is completely littered with this slop. People have become inured to the fact that AI has spread its tendrils to every aspect of their lives, and so its presence in anything has become expected. This is just me saying that if and when you buy the book, you can be assured that every single thing in it was created by a human being.

Because books, after all, are for human beings.

Trying it out

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk illustrations. I’d be lying if I said I had a ton of experience here. Or any experience at all.

But I’m one of those people who believes they’re capable of at least trying anything. And there’s really no downside here. If what I produce is total garbage, I’ll at least have a decent starting point to hand off to a professional. No big deal.

Before I tackled the actual illustrations for the books, though, I wanted to get my feet wet. While I was at my son’s Tae Kwon Do practice on Saturday, I sketched up this pack of… dovetails to feel out the colored pencils my wife lent me.

If I’m being honest, I don’t hate it. The Marlboro part is obviously goofy, but the actual look of the dovetails was decent enough for me to think I could reasonably pull this off for the book.