2025 creative project: reflection

On the right-hand side is a showcase of my negotiated creative project for MUED4002. This project is something I'm very passionate about, as it explores a topic that is very important to me. The current high-school and primary school music curriculums don't allow for an exploration of many different genres of music and different kinds of musicians, with there being a focus on Western classical music. This doesn't embrace the diversity of music and musicians, especially for Australian high-school students. The majority of students undergoing HSC music are not classical musicians, and so our curriculums must reflect this, and yet they still feed into classical superiority and elitism. To counterbalance this, my book series aims to introduce young, primary age students to all kinds of musicians, to allow them to embrace their creative side, push musical boundaries, and discover what genre/s of music call to them.

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The process of creating my three book prototypes was really tough, as I unfortunately cannot draw at all. Because illustrations are such a vital part of children's books, my inability to draw led me to have to resort to AI to generate prototypes of the kinds of illustrations I pictured for my books. Initially, I thought this would be an easy process, as all I would have to do is type in an image description, and AI would produce exactly what I had envisioned- but I was very wrong. The biggest block that I came across when trying to generate images was that I could not use the names of the artists the books were about. This meant that I had to try my best to describe each musician so that the AI could generate an image that looked as close to the musician as possible. For Damon Albarn, I worked out that I could write "britpop male with brown hair and brown eyes..." and it would generate a reasonable image of him, however David Byrne was a lot more challenging especially when trying to describe how he looked when he was younger. My biggest challenge was generating images of Jimmy Little, as the AI would generate grotesque, stereotypical images of Aboriginal Australians. When I would put in "Young Aboriginal man..." the AI would generate an image of a man with nothing but a loin cloth on, with full body paint, and a beard, which was really jarring to see. This meant I had to include things like "Aboriginal male IN FULL CLOTHES AND NO BEARD..." in my image description, however, even then the clothes would still have an Aboriginal flag or body paint on them. This was quite frustrating, and I eventually had to cave and include images I would otherwise not want to have appear in my book, as there was very little I could do. I think this was a huge flaw, and definitely impacted my view of AI images, as I now view it in a fairly negative light due to the harmful, stereotypical images generated. I found it baffling that it was unable to generate an image of 'Damon Albarn' because it went against their terms, and yet it was able to create terrible images of Aboriginal Peoples. 

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Another big dilemma I encountered in this project was trying to get the art style of my images to match, and have the characters match across all pages. This really impacted the flow of my books, as it ruins the reader's experience having each character look different on every page, and impacts the education on the musician provided by the books. That is why I made it very clear in the books and on my project description that these are just prototypes. The lack of continuity in my books is definitely a flaw and a let down, but unfortunately there wasn't much I could do to improve my image descriptions to get each image to match up. I even tried to get advice from ChatGPT on how I could improve the image descriptions I was putting in, and that still didn't help with the continuity issue.

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Overall, this was a really fun project to create, and it would be cool to one day see these books come to life with a proper illustrator!