Art VS artist: 2024

2024 has been a seemingly quiet year, but sprinkled with art nonetheless. I have had little energy to dedicate to posting on web and social media, so there are several finished works just sitting on my desk. There are paintings I have created for myself, others commissioned and published, some awaiting release. There are countless sketches that dot my notebooks, waiting to be developed. I am still in energy saving mode, and my good intentions for this year are to get back into gear with the creation of new paintings. And their publication 😅

Thank you, reader, for sharing this art journey with me.

Nightshade, a tool against AI scraping

Nightshade is a new tool artists can employ to disrupt AI Models. This is important – since Ai models cannot “forget” they ate copyrighted material even though the owners of said stuff ask for removal, well… let’s give the models something bad to eat. Something that will corrupt the data already inside. Guten appetit, stronzi.

“More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.” (from What is nightshade, https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu)

💚 Congratulations to all the researchers and artists who worked on this tool.

This said, right now Nightshade is available only for powerful desktop devices, but soon will be available via Browser. Most interesting, in fact, is Web Glaze, allowing artists to glaze their images even if they’re unable to install Glaze.

How can I help support Nightshade and Glaze?
Thank you so much for thinking of us. It is important to us that we not only continue to provide Glaze to visual creators for free, but also extend its protective capabilities. If you or your organization may be interested in pitching in to support and advance our work, please contact our colleague Joshua Leavitt to learn more about gift opportunities for Glaze (managed by the University of Chicago campus offices).”
(from FAQ, https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu)

Other than this, please support the project by following it on:
X/Twitter: @TheGlazeProject IG: theglazeproject

Article written on 12/02/2024 – Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai

A summary for a 2023 of art

⌛ In the picture: “Art vs artist 2023” – a way to stop and look back, take stock of a past year.

📘 A year with some noteworthy satisfactions, the publication of several publications with my illustrations: Autumn twilight, Shadow of the black rose, The journals of Kaz the Minotaur: the lost colony were released with the Dragonlance Nexus – the latter with the famous writer Richard Knaak. More illustrations for projects to be published next year.

🤝 Various private commissions, often full beautiful collaborations with people that opened for me doors to their cherised, secret worlds.

🎨 Few “personal” illustrations or in general creations – as often happens, sometimes a pencil sketch is enough for me to express what’s on my mind – and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll go back to expressing myself more.

🎭A difficult year from a health point of view, which started badly and ended badly; a year in which art was a crutch to move forward and lose myself in a world where things can go the way I want.

💻 A year in which I worked hard on my private website: a collection of my latest paintings in a place where I can take all the space I want to tell, as well as show, each painting – a private space outside of the big platforms like Deviantart and Artstation, which from my point of view they betrayed the world of artists, making all the contents available to the big AI companies when few still knew what was happening, so that Ai generated images suffocated the space meant for art created by humans.

Thank you, reader, for sharing this art journey with me.

Award-winning podcast: Echoes of Krynn

🏆🎤 I’m happy to share the news: the D&D podcast “Echoes of Krynn” by Lawful Stupid RPG – whose characters I had the pleasure of illustrating – won the gold prize in the Signal Award 2023!

“The Judges voted and the Echoes of Krynn podcast is a GOLD WINNER in the Signal Awards for General-Gaming & Actual Play!” – EOK


How about prints?

📸🎪 Some pictures from Echoes of Krynn at the SC Comicon Jr – Greenville, Oct 29th (US) – Lovely to see the prints of my paintings on display there. In the first picture, MEDM, the Dungeon Master!


Artwork page:

Article: 2023, Elena “Greenedera” Zambelli

Artwork update: dragons

05/09/2023 – A bunch of dragon paintings uploaded on my website! January 2023 was an intense moment, and I had not yet the time and the occasion to properly upload the flock of dragons that spawned from the Dragonary challenge.

🌕 The Golden Hoarder, 🍄 Grand Mushroom Dragon, 🔥 Fairy fire dragon, 📜 Medieval dragon, 🌊 Indigo sea serpent, 💧 Skerry reef drake, 🦄 Beware of my dragon friend, 🌄 Grumpy sentinel, 🍃 I believe I can fly, 🌀 Flaming amphiptere, 🐟 The coral wyrm, 🦋 Butterfly dragon, 🌺 Queen of the pond, 🌋 Magma dragon.

In each dragon page, their story and work in progress pics. Soon, more to come!

If you’re interested in prints, just let me know and I will set them.

New artwork – Production time vs Publication time

New artwork update:

Yes, I’m still here.

The contemporary age, internet, social media and everything in between, imply the need for constant updates (well, even normal relationships between people, actually 😅.) Yet, it is known, from time to time artists disappear off the face of the earth. Then, suddenly, they come back and dump a bunch of new creations.
Obviously, I too fall into this category… in the last few months I have accumulated a series of new paintings: some I can already publish, while for others it is necessary to wait for specific dates agreed with the people I work with: you can see some sneak peeks, at times, in my IG and FB stories.
Today I share 4 new paintings – then, there are other 7 in my “secret stack,” plus other 3 “work in progress”. Be patient, subscribe to web updates, and you will discover them in the next months: I can’t wait to share them with you.

New artwork: Lord Ariakas

🎨 Hello, still catching up with the publication of my paintings! This one was fun; created between April and May, it gave me the occasion to challenge myself with the depiction of a character I had never tried before: Lord Ariakas.

Lord Ariakas

🎨 My new digital painting of Ariakas, champion of Takhisis and Emperor of Ansalon during the War of the Lance. Commission for F.N., as a personal handout for a game campaign. “He was described as being tall of stature and possessing an impressive muscular physique. A physically…

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Artwork created on 15/05/2023 – Copyright Elena Zambelli “Greenedera” #noai

Art reveal: Lord Soth, shadow of the Black Rose

After months of waiting, I’m revealing the new artwork I did for the Dragonlance Nexus! Click on the link to see the full artwork.