Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2012

 Lomnický štít, Tatranska Lomnica, Slovakia

Water Street, St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada

Højbro Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark

Mahamakut Buddhist University, Chiang Mai, Thailand 

 Riga, Latvia

Breckenridge, Colorado, USA

  

Favourite Google Streetview Virtual Paintout ‘locations’ from 2013

 Corner of Calle dello Spezier and Calle Fondamenta Megio, Venice, Italy

Þjóðvegur, Iceland 

Rua Jorge M. Reis Machado, Azores

Via Roma Destra Bridge, Lido di Jeloso, Italy

Mosque in Smolevo, Bulgaria

Gedimino prospektas, Vilnius, Lithuania

Prospect Hill, Douglas, Isle of Man

Second round of my AI painting adventure

Admitting Defeat - Photoshopped Hellebores

Charlene Brown 2025

At the end of my February 5 blog post, I promised to keep you posted on my ongoing attempts to improve my hellebore painting with AI Image generation software.

Using Adobe Firefly™ I started with the instruction:  purple hellebores about 10 inches high with light dusting of snow and evergreen forest background

Which yielded the above suggestions.  Without pointing out that if I’d wanted magenta hellebores I’d have said so, I continued the operation using only the first picture.  (or not, as it turned out)

I uploaded my original hellebore painting as a composition reference. Then I asked for some special effects  ̶  baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction.  Here’s what I got instead.

They all seem to be edging toward the composition I requested… but have lost their forest backgrounds!  And their baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction instructions.

Apparently I still have to ‘educate’ the Firefly AI using my language and my pictures.

Or I can admit defeat and just use Adobe Photoshop™ (see above).  I’ll try again, probably not with Firefly, and keep you posted.

Favourite Google Streetviews from 2014

 Trädgårdsföreningen, Gothenburg, Sweden

Jinsha Township, Taiwan, ROC

Russky Bridge,Vladivostok, Russia 

Along Ruta 7, Southern Parks area of Chile 

Georges Pierhead, Liverpool, UK

Lake Jasna, Slovenia

Pershing Park, Washington, DC USA

Thawing Permafrost

Melting glaciers and thawing permafrost on Bylot Island NU
watercolour and crayon
©2025 Charlene Brown 

As the Arctic warms faster than any region on Earth, attention has largely been focused on the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice. But major changes are also taking place on land, and one of the most striking is the thawing of vast swaths of permafrost, the frozen layer of soil underlying the Arctic tundra and taiga. 

This thawing compounds the effects of climate change by releasing vast amounts of GHGs.  It is already changing the Arctic landscape, causing landslides, draining lakes, altering vegetation and even beginning to shift animal and bird species habitats.  Ecosystem changes make it increasingly difficult for subsistence indigenous Inuit and Arctic animals to find food. 

Lakeside permafrost slumps  ̶  an increasingly frequent occurrence

watercolour and crayon

©2025 Charlene Brown

Permafrost slumps result when the ice in the permafrost melts and the soil collapses.  As slumping expands, parts of the landscape are being transformed into nothing but mud, silt, and peat.

Some areas in the Arctic appear to be emitting even more carbon than they are storing, worsening climate change impacts by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events and wildfires.

Favourite Google Streetview paintings from 2015

 Jones Bridge, Manilla, Philippines

Market Square, Tallinn, Estonia

View from the Castle Garden, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic

Sarqaq, Greenland

Nazimuddin Rd. Dhaka, Bangladesh 

Lemon Hill Dr., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
 

Putting DeepSeek to work improving my blog (or not)

Original Hellebore painting
watercolour, ©2025 Charlene Brown

My computer had been offering me various AI programs every day for months, but I hadn’t really followed up on any of them  ̶  until DeepSeek hit North America and I signed up along with millions of others.

After DeepSeek asked how it could “help me today,” I made the rookie mistake of requesting: 

“Add content, improve composition, colour combinations and value contrasts in a watercolour painting”

I was planning to feed it the Hellebore painting above, and see what it could do with it.  However, my request caused it to reply: 

“Okay, the user wants to improve their watercolor painting in terms of composition, color combinations, and value contrasts. Let me start by breaking down each of these elements”… followed by 1077 well-organized, straightforward words instructing me how to do it myself. 

It crossed my mind that this particular Artificial Intelligence program was a little more intelligent than I was,or maybe it was simply more devious.  Then I decided I'd better go back to my Plans for myBlog for 2025 “AI Training: learning more about the AI capabilities on my computer, as well as training that AI to understand my way of thinking in order to refine my ideas and, possibly, my paintings.” I noticed that the first step I should have taken was "learning more about the AI capabilities on my computer" and realized I had been reading about DeepSeek’s latest model  ̶  Janus Pro, which features “Vision AND Image Gen In ONE Model” 

That was not what I had.  My version of DeepSeek is apparently untrainable in the image-fixing field. 

As I was only going to be able to refine my text, I gave it some notes on ‘the time of year hellebores bloom’ and received this reply:

“Hellebores, known as Lenten roses or Christmas roses, are perennial plants prized for their early blooming period and ability to thrive in cooler climates.  In temperate climates, their blooming season is usually February to April, but can begin as early as late December in milder areas.  They are among the first plants to bloom, often emerging through snow or frost.”  

To this I added:

“In the (sometimes) Mediterranean climate here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, hellebores  have been blooming since Christmas.  And they seem to be coping with the surprising dump of snow we’re getting right now better than most of us.”

I would have to use other AI programs to fix my pictures.  It came down to a choice between Adobe Photoshop’s Generative AI capabilities and Adobe Firefly.  I’ve been using Photoshop for almost thirty years, having taken my first lesson in Dubai in 1996, but this was my first try at using its Generative AI function.

Here is what I got when I selected the foreground and asked it to “improve value contrasts and add budding mauve crocus bulbs”:

First try with AI, Not one budding mauve crocus to be found

And here’s what I got when I selected the whole picture and asked it to “add 10 cm of snow on the ground, trees and flowers.”

Second try with AI

So I’m conceding that Photoshop Generative AI won the first two rounds.  But I will try to ‘train’ it again, after I’ve done some more reading.

I’ll keep you posted…

Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2016

 Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, Scotland 

Bodhiraja Mawatha, Sri Lanka    

Napa Valley, California, USA  

 Bleiksv, Norway