Making art from a pile of clothes

If there’s one thing exactly.ai has taught us, it’s that the strangest creations can emerge out of the most ordinary objects. We’re all guilty of letting our dirty laundry pile up: a heap of textiles spilling out of a basket in the corner of our bathrooms. To most of us, this tangle of shirts, trousers and dresses is nothing more than an inconvenient chore. For this competition, we challenge you to turn it into a source of inspiration.

The starting point is simple. Prepare some images of the clothes pile–it could be multi-coloured, have different textures–anything up to your preference. Then rain them as a model, generate them with AI, and let your imagination run wild. See where the exploration with AI could take you. Here's how to turn your clothes pile into artwork, step by step.

How to start?

1. Press the "Submit artwork" button on this page.

2. Start to train a new model with a minimal dataset, and focus on gathering samples of different clothing items with various textures, patterns, and colours of these items to become the building blocks of your experiment.

3. exactly.ai has a cool feature that allows you to control the generated image using sketches. You can upload your own – or an open-source – sketch and the generation will follow it as a guide.

Begin by uploading a few simple templates as a guideline, and the results were surprisingly cool – abstract, colourful images that captured the essence of the clothes, but not their literal form.

4. You can also create a custom sketch generator model in exactly.ai. This meant you could quickly generate sketches for new experiments, speeding up the creative process. From here, you can refine the results by incorporating successful generations back into the dataset.

5. Now the process looks like this:

6. You can even refine the model to add patterns where the clothes would form some animal shapes, which could make the result even more successful. By blending the textures and patterns of everyday clothes with exactly.ai’s sketch generator, you could create something entirely new.

7. Submit the generated images to this competition page–you can submit as many models and images as you like!

Who can participate

This is an opportunity for existing and new members of exactly. We invite artists, illustrators, and designers working with all mediums to come on board. Here, we would love to see your diverse, unique perspectives brought to life. Let’s create your personal AI models trained on your artwork, and submit images created with it to this competition.

Deadline is on 11 October, 2024, 23:59 utc

This is your chance to turn the ordinary objects around you into something extraordinary. Good luck, we look forward to your submissions!