tartaruga feliz's playful AI animations render dream-like energy

tartaruga feliz explores the intersection between art and ai

Combining her passion for spirituality, illustration, and technology, Brazilian illustrator Tartaruga Feliz presents her experimental series of digital artworks, enhanced and animated using artificial intelligence (AI) and the Pleiades. The illustrated gifs explore energy, psychology, and self-awareness, inspired by a playful sense of youthfulness. Rendering dream-like images in a somewhat ‘naïve’ and whimsical illustration style, the artworks express emotive brushstrokes of paint and ink and coarse marks of charcoal which are brought to life with the help of technology. Rhythmic motions seamlessly meld several frames together, transforming initially distorted and indistinguishable depictions to slowly reveal curious forms of faces and animals.

all images by Tartaruga Feliz

dream-like animations intuitively reveal whimsical forms

Continuing her exploration of designs that revolve around children, spirituality, and healing, for the first time Tartaruga Feliz experiments with a new creative process that fuses AI and intuitive traditional painting. The artist initially created each image in her series using physical mediums such as paint and ink. Then, with the intervention of AI, each illustration rhythmically shifts and melds in an instinctive, dream-like manner to give form to distorted and identifiable shapes and faces. Describing her process, Feliz explains: ‘This GIF is part of a series of artworks I’m creating in collaboration with AI. I feed them my drawings and words of loving kindness, and they dream something based on it.’

Throughout her career, Tartaruga Feliz has immersed herself in psychology, energy healing techniques, spirituality, symbolism, and artificial intelligence. This new project depicts the potential of generative art combining traditional mediums and AI, to unlock creative possibilities beyond the conventionalities of the design world today. The artist comments: ‘AIs are a wonderful tool for collaborating and enhancing your style, experimenting, and evolving your work as an artist; it is not a substitution for human imagination!’ Moreover, she explains that this collaboration enables an innovative, iterative process of brainstorming, rethinking, and re-painting, which makes each artist’s work unique. ‘My mark is still there; it wasn’t washed out by generic styles created by mixing whatever paintings are available online,’ she continues.

initially distorted images transform to reveal curious faces and animals