[bryantwolf]

Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks.

To answer a few of your comments:

Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft.

The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have.

Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.

[clash]

You left out the higher entity that takes away a significant portion of the snow that was accumulated at regular intervals.

It doesn't need to ruin the metaphor, though: The sun could do that job. It could also explain the fact that the portion that's taken differs depending on where on earth you are creating the snowball.

[perfmode]

The end result is quite stunning. quite beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to create it.

[bryantwolf]

Thank you for saying so. I’m glad it connected with you

[tecoholic]

This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style.

I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art.

As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did.

I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.

[gyomu]

> As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets

Buying digital drawing tools before you have the fundamentals nailed is a bad idea.

For anyone reading this who wants to learn how to draw: look up dynamic sketching, it’s a method that was developed by Norm Schureman at Art Center in LA in the 90s, targeted to getting product design students quickly up to speed. It’s very analytical and works well with engineer-brained people in my experience.

It’s mostly carried by Peter Han, a former student of his, these days, you can easily find resources online.

[tecoholic]

I completely agree. But, it’s one of those things you do “as a hobby”. I have also been gifted some Japanese drawing pencils because of my interest and occasional scribbles, but I have refused to open them because I can’t do justice to them.

[bryantwolf]

Shoot a way to contact you to tecoholic at bawolf.com and I'll invite you to a copy of the board you can duplicate and mess around with.

I appreciate the sentiment and I agree. While I think there are countless humans who could do way better, I was never going to hire someone to illustrate this. Furthermore, I don't think it reads very interestingly without the images. I doubt it would have even gotten published.

But now thousands of people have seen it, it's shown that it can strike a chord. Maybe it is worth polishing a little more. It would be adorable as a small book

[htrp]

how many iterations did you use for flora ai to generate the imagery?

[bryantwolf]

I bought the starter membership which is 20k credits for $18 and I have 5.7k credits left. They charge 50 credits a generation for nano banana. There was some LLM usage to plan the images too so the math is a little blurry but that should give you a rough sense