Meta Goggles, Procreate, and the Myth of the "Pure" Process

Meta Goggles, Procreate, and the Myth of the "Pure" Process

There is a question I get asked, sometimes gently and sometimes with a raised eyebrow disguised as curiosity: "Wait, you use meta goggles to make your art? Like, the tech glasses? Isn't that... cheating?"

 

Let me answer that the way I answer most things that try to shrink me into someone else's definition of legitimate.  No. It is not cheating. It is remembering.  Remembering that artists have always reached for whatever extends the hand, sharpens the eye, and gets the vision out of the body faster. The tool is never the soul of the work. The tool is just the bridge to the essence coming from the artist.

 

What I Actually Do

Here is my process, stripped of mystique and laid out plainly, because transparency is part of my practice, not a threat to it.

 

I open my IPad and Procreate App to create a reference image.  This helps me determine composition, perspective, add other reference items, work out colors, etc.  I use an apple pen to shade, sketch, draw on the image.  I can experiment, mess up, and re-do as many times as I would like.  A digital mockup of what the piece might be. 

  

Then, I put on my meta goggles and size and lock the image to the canvas.  I then either sketch with a pen, pencil or paint brush the image that I have created onto the canvas.  The goggles give me a skeleton. Once the sketch is done the goggles come off.  Now I can create from the skeleton sketch everything that makes the piece mine.  The color story, the symbolism, the emotional register, the parts I exaggerate and the parts that I let dissolve. It may go somewhere unexpected from the sketch and that’s where the magic happens.  That can’t be captured by any device. That's channeled by me, the original artist, in the process of creating.

 

Nothing was created by a machine and handed to me finished. I am not asking anything to dream up my composition or imagine my meaning. I am using a modern tool to gather raw material, the same raw material of life artists have always been gathering for centuries, and then doing the actual work of transforming it into art.

 

The Controversy, Named Honestly

I've watched it happen to other artists in real time and have my own experiences.  The accusations flying because someone's anatomy was too accurate, someone's perspective was too clean, and the internet decided that precision itself was suspicious. In one widely discussed case, an artist's skill level was questioned specifically because it seemed to exceed what people expected from someone at their stated experience level, sparking speculation about whether shortcuts were involved.

 

I understand the fear underneath the controversy. Much like past artistic movements that expanded on earlier techniques, AI and tech-assisted tools are being framed by some as a new medium for creative expression, while others insist they strip away the intentionality and emotional depth that define traditional work. That fear is sacred, in its own way. It's protecting something real: the idea that art should hold a human fingerprint.

 

But here's where I diverge sharply from the panic. Using references, gathered through goggles instead of a projector, a photo, a postcard, or a long stare at a landscape, does not remove the fingerprint. It just speeds up the gathering. The fingerprint shows up later, in every choice I make once the reference is just a ghost beneath my work. 

 

Every artist has their voice, their fingerprint in every stroke.

 

This is different from tracing someone else's finished art without credit or asking a generator to produce a composition from a prompt and presenting it as handmade. That kind of practice, building on an existing image as a base without acknowledgment, is widely regarded as unethical within the art community, and rightly so. There's a real, important line between gathering your own reference material and appropriating someone else's finished creative labor. I stand firmly on the ethical side of that line, and I think conflating the two because of technology is where a lot of this controversy gets sloppy.

 

We Have Done This Before, With Every Single Generation

If you want to be horrified by efficiency in art, you're going to have to be horrified by almost the entire Western canon.

 

The grid and new doodle method. Renaissance and academic painters squared off their reference and their canvas into matching grids so they could transfer proportion accurately, square by square. Nobody calls Michelangelo's grid work a moral failing. It was just a clever way to be accurate, to not fight with proportions, to make it easier to get on with the real creating.  No, the doodle method has replaced it, but it’s the same principle.  Draw a doodle on the canvas, wall, etc.  Then capture that in the software as an overlay to your reference drawing with the correct ratio.  Make the doodle semi transparent and once you have it locked with your reference drawing you can see right where the sketch needs to be on the canvas, wall, etc.  Basically, instead of a grid, the doodle is the marker that shows you where to sketch every line. 

 

The camera obscura and camera lucida. This is the one that breaks the myth wide open. David Hockney's controversial 2001 thesis argues that the dramatic leap toward visual realism in Western art around the 1420s came largely from artists discovering optical projection devices, like a concave mirror arrangement that let them project a real image directly onto their working surface. The camera lucida specifically allowed an artist to see an optical overlay of their subject directly on the drawing surface, letting them duplicate key points of perspective with far more accuracy than eyeballing alone.  Hockney didn't stop at theory, he spent a year working with a camera lucida himself and built a case that artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Caravaggio and Vermeer may have used optical devices like the camera obscura, camera lucida, and various mirrors and lenses to achieve their extraordinary realism. Was it controversial? Enormously. It pitted scientists against each other and put art historians at odds with their own colleagues. But notice what the controversy was actually about, not whether using the tool made the work less than art, but whether the masters had used it at all. Nobody seriously argued that a Vermeer interior would stop being a masterpiece if a lens helped him see the light correctly.  I challenge anyone, who isn’t an artist, to sketch an outline of an image and with no training paint something that is worth looking at.  It’s the artists that actually bring every micro decision to the piece itself. 

 

Projectors. This isn't ancient history, it's recent, normal, and widely practiced. Norman Rockwell is well known to have sometimes used a projector to save time in his work, and the photorealist painters used projectors as a core part of their practice too. One commentator put it simply: with as many artists across the centuries using a camera obscura or camera lucida as a tool, there's no real argument left against someone using these tools now, and nobody seems to criticize using a grid to judge spatial relationships either.

 

Tracing and rotoscoping used honestly. Tracing exists in many legitimate forms. Rotoscoping, tracing over 3D models, using tracing paper, and using your own past works can serve as a genuine learning tool and time-saving techniques when disclosed and used with integrity. The morality was never in the existence of the shortcut. It lives in the intentions and transparency of the artist using it.

 

My meta goggles are this generation's camera lucida. That's it.  Nothing more, nothing less.

 

Why I Refuse the Shame

Art has never been a contest of who suffered the most friction to get the image out of their body. That belief, that struggle is the proof of authenticity, is one of the "outdated systems" I am actively disrupting in my own practice and in how I teach other creatives to think about theirs.

 

What makes a piece mine is not how I captured the reference. It's the alchemy that happens after.  The part no goggles, no grid, no projector has ever been able to touch. The symbolism I layer in. The palette I choose, because it says something underneath the literal image. The parts of the reference I burn away entirely because they don't serve the emotional truth I'm building toward in the moment of creation. That is where the soul lives. That is the unrepeatable, unautomatable part. It’s in the process of creating itself.  No device has ever painted a single one of my pieces. It has only ever helped me see clearly enough to bring my imagined vision to life.

 

The art world has long been a battleground for debates on value, authenticity, and technique.  From the skepticism that greeted photography in its early years to today's contentious discussions around new tools. The names of the tools change. Fear stays remarkably the same.

 

I'd rather spend my limited hours on this earth bringing my vision of beauty into the world that only I can do.  The transformation, the meaning-making, the brushwork.  I’d rather do that than proving my devotion by making the reference-gathering harder than it needs to be. Efficiency is not the enemy of originality or authentic creation. It is what frees the soul to go deeper, faster, more often.

 

So yes. I wear the goggles (sometimes, not always). I lock the reference. I sketch, I shade, I paint. And what comes out the other side is still undeniably, unmistakably mine.

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