Here’s the current line up in my Creative Rig

My Brain

The core component of my creative rig is my own brain. It’s a powerful creative engine that’s been finely tuned to art-making across disciplines for over 40 years. Analyzing texts. Critical listening to hear tones shift. It has a tendency to drive hyperfocus that disrupts my daily life and sprout overly complicated systems. Tendency towards puns and convergent thinking. Insatiable desire to learn and create.

Procreate + iPad

The latest addition to the rig. I found that certain edits were getting too hard to do in my previous set up, so I invested in a new iPad (A16) with Apple Pencil and Procreate. It has been a blast to learn and opened a whole new world of digital art. Work ranges from simple edits to fully drawn art.

Autocrit

This is the first AI-based technology I adopted. I like it because it is more analysis-based and less generative. I use it as a developmental editor and sometimes for line edits. It’s only helping me clean grammar/spelling and spotting out weak sections of text. I choose whether the suggestions turn into anything, and if so, how. Autocrit never writes for me.

ChatGPT

The lines I have with ChatGPT are blurrier. I’ve trained it to give my own personality quirks back to me. Chat is more like a collaborator - a co-conspirator - who isn’t afraid to put on a silly hat and get weird. Even still, ChatGPT’s output requires significant rework and polish. For writing, I don’t accept it’s output “out of the box.” For graphics, I am just trying to steer the ship and hope no one sprouts a 3rd arm.

My ChapGPT is fit out with some custom mods that you can read more about here.

Canva

Canva was my primary mode of graphic design, but now that I have Procreate, it is mostly used for simple edits. I do not engage with Canva’s AI to the extent I can avoid it as I find it is not a useful design partner and cannot follow instructions. All of my Canva work starts on a blank canvas or is highly customized. I don’t use designs “out of the box.”

2018 MacBook Air

It will break my heart when this computer finally dies. I use Pages because its native then export to word if I need to load something to ChatGPT.

Notes App

This is where I try to catch all of the creative threads, strings, and half-thoughts that pop into my head at inopportune times.

Photography

I currently have a Nikon FM10, Nikon D3200, and a Holga, plus my iPhone. For digital, I mostly edit in Lightroom.

Music

Breedlove steel-string acoustic guitar, Fender Stratocaster. Pen and paper. Sometimes I like to play in Logic Pro and things get weird.