Recipe seven: How to use ai to make art out of 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. But for Maxim Pogrebnyak, it became a source of inspiration.

Here’s how he turned a pile of clothes into works of art, using a custom model and exactly.ai’s handy sketch function.

1. I started with a minimal dataset, focusing on gathering samples of different clothing items.

The idea was simple: I wanted to generate something inspired by a pile of multi-coloured clothes, but not clothing itself. I wanted the textures, patterns, and colours of these items to become the building blocks of our experiment.

2. 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.

We began 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.

3. For convenience, we created a custom sketch generator model in exactly.ai.

This meant we could quickly generate sketches for new experiments, speeding up the creative process. With each iteration, we refined the results by incorporating successful generations back into the dataset.

4. Now the process looks like this:

5. We even refined the model to add patterns where the clothes would form some animal shapes, which turned out to be even more successful.

By blending the textures and patterns of everyday clothes with exactly.ai’s sketch generator, I created something entirely new.

You can do this too. Next time you spot some interesting textures, upload them to exactly.ai and transform them into works of art.

Look around you – inspiration could be anywhere. Subscribe today to start your journey.