Drawzer is a website that does just one thing. It generates random ideas for art. I used it to make some AI images: “Three-toed lizard marching in a videogame,” an “artist smoking a huge pipe in a pool of goo,” and “a yeti playing the drums in an old west town.” — MF

Watch sidewalk artists in Waikiki draw extreme caricatures of customers, and their customer’s hysterical reactions. The drawings are much more exaggerated than typical caricatures yet they look uncannily like the subjects. I was laughing along with the people who bravely sat for the drawings. A guaranteed mood lifter. — MF

One of my favorite living artists is Tauba Auerbach. I first encountered her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she had a solo show at the age of 40. There is a nerd appeal to her work. She enjoys knots, new materials, geometry, calligraphy, camouflage, glass blowing, weaving patterns, all in service of beautiful surprises. She is a good follow on Instagram, and is worth a trip out of your way to see her exhibits. — KK

Artvee is where you can browse and download high resolution copies of classical and modern art that is in the public domain. It’s free and you can do whatever you want with it. Some of my favorite stuff on Artvee is the art from illustrated books. — KK

Creep Mart is one of my new favorite Instagram accounts. The feed consists of AI-generated images of imaginary monster toys, complete with retro boxes. I think some of these would make excellent real toys, like the Scary Patch Machine or the Spooky Slime. — MF

The Dutch painter Vemeer is in the news because the few paintings he did in his life are all being gathered into one exhibit. Many scholars contend that his paintings are anachronistically photo-realistic because he was using optical devices to help him paint, centuries before cameras. To prove this theory, a crazy inventor named Tim Jenison spent five years recreating Vermeer’s favorite room including replicating all the furniture, and then figured out a way Vermeer could have used two mirrors (one concave) to project the image. Tim then spent one year using optics to precisely recreate Vermeer’s painting stroke by stroke – even though he had never painted before. It’s an epic journey of ingenuity and utterly mad obsessiveness. The whole story is told in an amazing 2014 documentary Tim’s Vermeer. (On YouTube for free, or on paid streaming services.) — KK

Every new tech generates new art forms. So I’ve been waiting for new art forms based on AI to arrive. One suggestion of a new AI art is a Instagram account that posts AI generated scenes from a unified fictional world. Somehow the artist(s) have figure out the prompts to explore this elaborate fiction consistently. (They are not the only one doing this; others have similar worlds, but theirs is the best so far.) This alternative world, manifested in detail, is zany, stunning, and oddly beautiful. Check out TheVisualDome for a hint of what is to come. — KK

Last year I drew or painted one art piece each day. This year I chose one piece to display as a mural on our living room wall. It came out fantastic! I used Wallsauce to print it out as repositionable wallpaper. I uploaded my digital file after I up-rezed it. My huge picture was 65 x 50 inches ($140), and arrived as two perfectly matched strips. The print was easy to apply (no glue, no mess) and looks like a genuine mural. The paper is a canvas-y textured plastic film, with very dense coloring. We are now hunting for other walls to beautify. — KK

On January 1, artistic works published in 1927 will enter the public domain, which means they can be downloaded, resold, and modified in the United States without copyright restriction. Duke University has a list of notable books, songs, movies that will become free to use in 2023. They include Metropolis by Thea von Harbou, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, “Trolley Troubles,“ starring Walt Disney’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century by Phillip Francis Nowlan, and Popeye by E.C. Segar. — MF

Everyone will soon have access to an AI image generator, like DALL·E, Midjourney, or Google Imagen. You will tell this tool what to create and it will make an imaginative piece of art, either a painting or a photograph. With a generator you can make art even if you are “not an artist.” The key human skill is in how you construct the prompt you give the AI. The Prompt Book is a free PDF e-book that provides smart instructions, great tips, and fabulous examples of how best to prompt the AI. It was produced with DALL·E in mind, but it’s guidance can be used with any recent AI image generator. This is the first of what I predict will be many prompt books in the future. — KK

I started playing around with AI generated art this week, using this guide from the Unlimited Dream Co. I’m blown away with what the software produces from a text prompt. Here’s a “plastic space deity” and an “alien astronaut helmet” I asked the AI to create for me. Be sure to check the Unlimited Dream Co.’s art, too. It’s incredible. — MF

Artvee is a collection of tens of thousands of digitized paintings and illiustrations from museums around the world. According to the site, these images are “available for use for any purpose with no restrictions attached.” I especially like these typographic theater posters. — MF

I don’t have a single tattoo. Not one. And I have no intention of getting one. But I follow this fantastic tattooist on Instagram because their designs are so delightful. Michele Volpi creates exquisitely detailed monochrome diagrams that are whimsical, elaborate, yet scientifically precise. My kind of thing. — KK

I’m a big fan of Retrosupply, which sells digital brushes, fonts, and textures for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate. They also have an excellent tutorial section with free videos and instructions for creating retro-style art. It’s a good way to learn how to use digital drawing tools, especially Procreate. (Here’s a sketch I drew using Retrosupply textures and brushes.) — MF

Dream by WOMBO is an AI art machine that is fun to play with. All you have to do is enter a text prompt and pick an art style to create something weird. This is great for bringing to life imagery from dreams and or designing your own oracle deck. Here are a few I made: Dimension of Play, Guardian Tree Spirits and Frog Shaman. — CD

Mixing a specific color by hand — I want to make this particular shade of green starting from primary colors — is a super skill that artists acquire and is much harder than it looks. I watched many YouTube tutorials to learn how to do this with paints and this one by Draw Mix Paint was the best method for me. It’s still more art than science. — KK

It was always a painstaking process for me to color in between lines, and painting is too slow and methodical for my messy ways. I wish I had these Faber-Castell Watercolour Pencils when I was a kid. It’s the easiest way to watercolor paint — and the fastest! I just scribble in a little color here and there and use a water brush pen like this to transform the pigments into paint. I started with the 12 color set for around $20 and then upgraded myself to the 36 color set ($50) after I got more consistent with it. Maybe someday I’ll earn the 120-color set. — CD

I’ve been making art every day this year. I don’t care whether it is good or bad, I just enjoy doing it. One of my favorite artists, Grayson Perry, has a BBC TV series called Grayson’s Art Club, where he invites celebs and ordinary people in England to join him in making everyday art. His enthusiasm for all kinds of art, no matter its source, and his low-rent approach to creativity is a total joy and inspiration to watch. The show is warm and utterly brilliant, and makes me want to keep making more. It’s the best thing I’ve seen on making your own art. (While you can stream both seasons of this BBC4 show, you need to do it either in England or with a VPN set to England, and with your ad-blocker off.) — KK

Beeple is the artist who famously sold a digital NFT of his artwork for $69 million. While that is crazy and hard to believe, what I find more remarkable is that the art piece was a montage of 5,000 paintings he did over 5,000 days. Without fail, he created a piece of art for 5,000 consecutive days and shared it. I found this short YouTube video of Beeple talking about this daily habit, before he was rich and a celebrity, so inspirational that I began making a piece of art everyday myself. (You can see my first 60 pieces archived here, or posted on my Instagram.) — KK

Mark Rothko’s painting, Black on Maroon (1958), was defaced with a black graffiti marker in 2012. “Restoring Rothko” (on YouTube) is a 17-minute documentary that shows how the expert restoration team at the Tate Gallery in London tested solvents and cleaning methods for nine months to find the optimal cleaning strategy for removing the ink while preserving Black on Maroon’s delicate paint layers. Rachel Barker, lead restorer, spent nine more months painstakingly removing the surface ink and carefully touching up the painting’s surface with oil paints. — MF