So, I Wrote a 300 Page Book of Lipedema Lady Art in One Day, and It’s Pretty Great!

Hi friends!

To get this party started, if you’d like to see the book and even purchase a coffee table version, here’s the link to the book I’m talking about: https://amzn.to/3Nrm3yC

Now we can start. I’ve been researching an upcoming set of posts about how society can support women with lipedema. One of the ideas that continue to pop up supports what I, other authors, business owners, bloggers, influencers, artists, and oversharers in our very small (relatively speaking) online lipedema community already do. And that is to encourage media representation by showing a more diverse representation of body sizes in media, entertainment, art, and advertising to combat unrealistic beauty standards and portray people of all sizes. Yes, I’ve already written two books and obviously overshare, but what’s there for art? I know I personally bought some lipedema art for my office off of Etsy, but were there any say…coffee table books dedicated to lipedema women? I didn’t find any.

So, yesterday, I decided to make one, as in, from start to finish in one day. It was my first time to use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) generator, and I had a lot of fun using one called DALL-E. All I had to do what tell is precisely what I wanted it to generate, and in what art medium it should represent. Sometimes I would have to ask several times to get the image I had in my head to generate. Some argue I shouldn’t use AI because it steals from artists. Believe me when I tell you, no artist has created the images I conjured up in my head. I don’t really know how it works, but thank you artists, for setting the base strokes somewhere in history so one day, a lady in Oklahoma could dream up visions of lipedema ladies flying through the sky and have a computer somehow get that onto paper for me. For me, having a tool like AI art generation is very empowering. I’ve always wanted to make actual art, but my skills equate to literally those of around a second grader on my best day. I have fantastic ideas but the message is lost in translation from brain to paintbrush. AI frees me up to make the images in my head instead of some sad stick figure with googly eyes in various, sad poses. There are a couple of pieces of the artwork that the faces are, well, odd, and maybe a little deformed. I got a little snicker out of them, and decided to leave them in the book for entertainment purposes, intentionally. I hope you have fun finding them and enjoy the laugh as well!

This one’s a little kooky, with her feet initially appearing like they’re dangling from the car. I figured out she is standing behind the car. This is a mistake I would make as a terrible artist, so I kept it.

Once I decided what I needed to do, there was no stopping me. I shut the home office door, grabbed a fresh template for books off of Kindle Direct Publishing (it’s where I manage all of my books to sell on Amazon), and cranked up the AI generator. At first the prompts resulted in all kinds of things, but once I understood how to make the images do what I wanted, the process actually went pretty quickly. (Of course, it helped that I already am super familiar with the sometimes overwhelming process to actually make and publish a book.) Four hours later, I was making a cover, uploading details and sending the book off to the presses. The last step is for Amazon folks to review the book to make sure it meets their standards, and then they approve it for me to hit the ‘publish’ button. That’s been completed so far, for the kindle version and the paperback version. Based on my experience with Aqua Therapy for Lipedema and Lymphedema, the hardback version takes longer for approval, but that’ll be soon.

I decided to actually do press releases to major new outlets about this book, one, for the purposes of raising awareness about Lipedema. If you can see it, you can normalize it, and if you normalize it, you can get research, diagnosis and treatments for lipedema. That’s so important. Also, if others see themselves represented in artwork, they literally feel less alone, like they’re part of a real population of the world and are not ‘freaks’ (as my Mom used to say about her own legs). We are 11% of people and we should be represented broadly in art. And if you can’t find it, use the tools you have to make it and broadcast it outside of the choir and into the whole world.