Shadeart is my term for working in digital painting, autodidactic collage, and echoes of my dreams and moods. I began painting digitally in 2010, testing software as paper that never goes to waste, with storage I can carry in my pocket. As my physical space shrank and I moved between places without a studio of my own, I replaced airbrush, oils, and acrylics with their digital equivalents.

Recently, I trained a closed model on my own mixed-media works and built a digital texture and shape bank of around 50 to 80 images. The system learns my rhythm and produces material for me to work with. This process operates entirely on my own archive, rather than borrowing or extracting from others. The outputs are raw material. They are far from perfect and often muddy or blurred, like me without my glasses.

The machine makes accidents, ugly splatter, and I take this back to the editing board in Photoshop and Sketchbook. I paint over it, often using high-noise brushes, cut and recombine the images, collage them with my photography, or layer and overlay elements. I add eyes for them to see and reshape them into new works, translating digital residue back into physical form.

This process is less about automation and more about reclaiming the ghost inside the machine, where the spirit of failure still moves beneath the algorithm.

If you like them you can purchase prints in my print store
If you wish to commision me for your project or publication please contact me at dialhardest@dialhard.store