Featured image: Embroidery
2025 brought a new chapter for DeerArt. As always, it starts with photography — my own images, captured in the real world, carrying texture, light, and accident. In the studio (which is really just GIMP and a lot of patience), these photos get layered, blended, and transformed into something that no single shot could ever be. What's new in 2025: I've let Midjourney into the process. Not as a shortcut, but as another ingredient — like a found object in a collage. The AI generates raw material; I decide what stays, what gets buried under layers, and what shapes the final image. The result is what I call Photographik: part photography, part digital painting, part something I can't fully explain myself.
The Born Idea: From Embroidery to Photographik
In 2025, I found myself drawn to the ancient craft of embroidery — its intricate patterns, its textures you can almost feel. There's something meditative about the way a needle traces its path through fabric, building an image stitch by stitch. I wanted to capture that quality and pull it into my own world of Photographik. Embroidery is the result: a piece that doesn't just depict needlework, but tries to be it — digitally layered, yet tactile in spirit. Old craft, new tools, one image.
Creativity in Code: AI as Co-Creator
What makes Embroidery unusual is how it came to life. Midjourney didn't replace the creative process — it joined it. I used AI-generated elements to explore patterns and structures that would have been impossible to stitch together by hand, digitally or otherwise. But the AI was never in charge. Every output became raw material: something to layer, to distort, to argue with in GIMP until the image found its own logic. The result feels handmade and algorithmic at once — which is exactly the tension I was after.
The image on the right shows an early composite stage, where embroidery-inspired patterns from Midjourney were first merged with photographic material — before colour grading and final layering shaped the result.
Securing Uniqueness: Own a Piece of Digital Art
Embroidery rewards closer looking — the more time you spend with it, the more layers reveal themselves, literally and conceptually. It's a piece for collectors who want something that carries a story: where it came from, how it was made, and what it bridges. Tradition and technology. Needle and algorithm. If that tension speaks to you, this might be your piece.
The image on the left shows another stage in the process — though "intermediate" is perhaps the wrong word. In Photographik, there is no single moment where an image becomes finished. Every layer is a decision, and every decision could have been the last. What you see here is one path not taken.