We’re back! It’s been a very long time since Flutters and I visited a new destination, my obsession with Midjourney has mostly been to blame, but, it’s not like we don’t regularly check the Destination Guide, we simply haven’t seen much that grabbed us, and the few places we actually have been, were less than inspiring, until we discovered Hillvale, the other day…
… we were instantly smitten, this is totally our kind of place…
… the fabulous sky, the gorgeous neon, the apocalyptic grunge…
… it’s like Drune meets Tralala’s Diner, without the lag…
… beautiful colours, just the right amount of clutter and motion…
… not an element out of place…
… lots and lots of pretty photo opportunities…
… we spent a good half hour, here, just walking and stopping, and taking pictures…
… like I said, it’s the first sim we’ve visited for a long time that’s really grabbed our attention…
… well worth a visit…
… we strolled right to the end of the main street, where there is a beach. There are nice places to rent, here, too, but the rent is a bit out of our league, otherwise I’d seriously have considered renting here, just because it’s such a pretty place.
Not really sure why I love doing these underwater babes so much…
… I’ve always adored Pre-Raphaelite art…
… and their adoration of the Ophelia story produced many gorgeous paintings…
… the romanticism of watery death, plus, just the power of watery places, the beauty that accompanies the deadly potential of slow, deep rivers…
… has held me in thrall since childhood, since long before I discovered Ophelia art…
… one of my favourite sci-fi authors from decades ago is J G Ballard…
… he, too, among other themes, was fascinated by water, and even wrote a story about someone just laying at the bottom of their swimming pool, long after they should have drowned, just breathing the calmness of the water…
… that’s what these images are about…
… not drowning, but arriving, whether as a dreamer, or somehow miraculously, in this safe, underwater reality, where you feel, finally, safe.
So, after looking at this image a bit longer, once I’d posted it, I decided that, no, the Mj anatomical weirdness I’d left in didn’t make it ‘dream-like’… in fact, it made it nightmarish…
… so I spent a few more minutes, 15 at most, and fixed it, kinda embarrassed by my initial laziness.
Thought I’d do some more underwater dream girls, another theme I really enjoy pursuing… these ones are all slightly distorted, but I really like them…
… I’ve smoothed over the uglier glitches in glorious Photoshop CS5.1, but not gone out of my way to fix the anatomical distortions that I feel still work, somehow…
I’m really loving the more ‘painterly’ results I’m getting…
… by including my own textures with the prompts I add to images I create in Mj (Midjourney)…
… these results are much looser than the ones I was going for, and largely achieving, with my ‘Machine Dolls’, and I’ve actually embraced Mj’s penchant for putting stuff all over faces, rather than trying to fight it…
… which is making everything more ‘organic’ looking, I guess. Anyway, I like the results.
I have made a technique breakthrough that I think is a game-changer for my Mj (Midjourney) work…
… I decided to see what would happen if I paired portraits I’d created in Mj with my own textures (I’ve been making my own textures in Photoshop for over a decade)…
… these are the results! Gorgeous, painterly images…
… I’m really, really excited with this development. When you add a texture image to, in my case, a portrait image…
… Mj doesn’t just put it in the background, it puts it everywhere, in these cases, due to the textures I’ve used, it has created brush-like strokes…
… I asked it for ‘soft side lighting’, and gave it my textures to work with, and it has done a stunning job of softening everything, and producing gorgeous lighting…
… it also started creating these beautiful, pixie-like faces, somehow based on the textures, because none of my original portraits looked this adorable…
… but I’m simply blown away by these wonderful, dreamy, moody images… I make a point of never asking Mj to mimic anyone else’s style, I don’t even stipulate things like ‘painterly’, I just beaver away trying to create my own style… this is really close to what that style has always looked like in my mind…
As promised, this is how the Machine Dolls evolved into synthetic organisms…
… though still the creations of dreaming AI’s, they began to look less and less ‘human’…
… less like ‘androids’…
… and more like synthetic organisms, synthetic organics… so, after I’d done my brief play with alien plants, I decided to revisit these synthetic organisms, and introduce the alien plant influence…
… this was the result… creatures that suddenly became organic-looking, as apposed to synthetic-organic…
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