Brief /
Belly Button 是一個從手繪角色出發的 AI 生成影像實驗。這些角色原本來自我平常隨手畫下的小怪物：有點無意義、有點奇怪，也帶著一種醜萌的幽默感。它們沒有完整設定的角色，也沒有明確的故事背景，更像是在放空、塗鴉、手不自覺移動時自然長出來的生物。 在這個專案中，我將這些手繪角色作為基礎，訓練了一個 LoRA 模型，並透過 Stable Diffusion 生成大量新的角色圖像。對我來說，這不是單純使用 AI 來「大量產圖」，而是把原本存在於手繪過程中的隨機性，延伸到數位生成系統裡。 人用手畫出第一批怪物，AI 再根據這些怪物繼續想像、誤讀、變形與繁殖。於是，Belly Button 變成了一個介於手繪與 AI 生成之間的小宇宙。
Belly Button is an AI-generated image experiment that began with a series of hand-drawn characters. These characters came from my casual doodles: small strange creatures that feel a little meaningless, a little weird, and carry a kind of ugly-cute humor. They were not fully designed characters with clear backstories, but rather beings that appeared naturally while I was drawing in a half-absent, almost unconscious state. For this project, I used these hand-drawn characters as the foundation to train a LoRA model, then generated a large number of new character images with Stable Diffusion. To me, this was not simply about using AI to produce images at scale. It was more about extending the randomness that already existed in my drawing process into a digital generative system. A human hand first created the original monsters, and AI continued to imagine, misread, transform, and multiply them. In this way, Belly Button became a small universe that exists somewhere between hand-drawing and machine generation.
Concept /
Belly Button 並不是要創造完美、精緻或可愛的角色，本來就是想保留一種創作過程中隨機出現的怪感。 手繪時，線條可能因為手的慣性，表情可能是無意間畫歪，角色也可能是在半放空的狀態下突然出現。這種隨機、失控、甚至有點笨拙的部分，是我最感興趣的地方。當我把這些角色交給 AI 訓練後，這種隨機性被轉換成另一種形式。AI 根據資料中的線索，生成新的變體：有些很接近原本的手繪，有些變得更奇怪，有些甚至像是模型自己誤會了什麼。這些錯誤、偏差和不穩定，成為這個專案最有趣的部分。Belly Button 像是一個由人類塗鴉與 AI 想像共同生成的怪物群。它們既來自我的手，也來自模型的誤讀；既是角色設計，也是隨機生成的數位生物。透過這個專案，我想探索的是：當創作從手延伸到機器，隨機性是否仍然可以保留原本的溫度與幽默。
The core of Belly Button is not to create perfect, polished, or conventionally cute characters. Instead, I wanted to preserve the strange feeling that appears by accident during the creative process. When drawing by hand, many forms are not completely planned. A line might come from the inertia of the hand, an expression might appear because something was drawn slightly wrong, and a character might suddenly emerge while the mind is wandering. This randomness, loss of control, and slight awkwardness are the parts that interest me the most. By training an AI model with these characters, that randomness was translated into another form. The AI does not truly understand the characters, but it responds to the visual clues in the dataset and generates new variations. Some stay close to the original drawings, some become stranger, and some feel as if the model has misunderstood something in an interesting way. These mistakes, deviations, and unstable results became the most exciting part of the project. Belly Button is a group of creatures co-generated by human doodling and AI imagination. They come both from my hand and from the model’s misreadings. They are character designs, but also randomly generated digital beings. Through this project, I wanted to explore whether randomness can still carry warmth, humor, and an unpredictable sense of life when the act of creation extends from the hand to the machine.
