A girl finds herself underwater… ‘Is this a dream?’ she wonders…
… if it is, it’s very real…
… and she has no problem breathing water…
… and it’s really beautiful here…
… dream, another reality, whatever… it seems to be her current reality…
… things could be worse.
We think these are the best Elf images we have created so far! In the one above you can see how Mj randomly adds elements that are usually bizarre, but sometimes perfect, like this sweet Elf’s darker skin pigmentation, which we think is a really beautiful touch…
… we love everything about these images…
… we love the sharpness of the detail…
… the lushness of the plant colour…
… the falling rain/dew, which is another element Mj spontaneously added…
… and, of course, the absolutely gorgeous Elves (:
Playing around with frames…
… we created this gorgeous Elf babe in Mj…
… and we tried making frames in Mj, but it just couldn’t grasp the concept of an ‘art nouveau frame’… it could do frames, but they were NOT art nouveau…
… we tried Night Cafe, but, although it did a much better job, they were too much like a Disney version of an art nouveau frame…
… but Dream Machine produced lots of really nice, very art nouveau, frames. So here we have the perfect working combo of three (counting glorious Photoshop CS5.1) different programs. We really adore this sweet elf, everything about her. We’re not sure the whole ‘framed’ thing looks any good, but it’s an idea we’ve wanted to explore for a while, so this is a start (:
It took us days of playing around, blending and blending, trying to get this result… finally we thought of using the best image we’d managed to create, and using it in a prompt line (with the words ‘warrior nun’), using the ‘imagine’ function, which we’ve hardly used for months, now…
… wish we’d thought of it earlier! These magnificent creatures are exactly what we’d been trying to create…
… we imagined warrior nuns to be strapping, raw-boned amazons, tougher than most men, a bit like Brienne of Tarth, but without the education…
… they would have been simple farm girls, primed by the church to do the brutal work of their unforgiving god…
… and here they are, in all their driven splendour…
… glorious, fearless angels of death.
A bit of design fun…
… creating imaginary 1970’s scifi book covers…
… for an imaginary story called ‘The Perils of Eden’…
… about the dangers awaiting colonists…
… to a seemingly pristine planet they have, of course, named ‘Eden’…
… we love this stuff (:
Just to be safe, we googled our imaginary title… there IS a book called ‘Perils of Eden’ (it’s not scifi)… of course there is, such a great title… we feel that, for the purposes of our bit of fun, ‘The Perils of Eden’ is sufficiently different.
Even little aliens get the blues sometimes…
… they mope around in shallow lakes of water-like stuff, beneath flat, yellow skies…
… wondering why the universe is so cruel…
… and what it all means…
… then they start noticing how beautiful this particular part of the lake is…
… and they start to feel better…
… and realise that everything is balanced by everything else, you just need to understand the points of balance.
To our delighted astonishment, all the functions we’d given up on trying to make work on our damaged Mac suddenly started, with no further prompting from us, to work… the installers for Adobe Bridge and Discord, that we’d been futilely double clicking (and trying all the recommended workarounds to get to open) two days ago, suddenly opened…
… not only that, which gave us beautiful Bridge and full access to Midjourney, again, but Bluetooth suddenly started working properly, again, and, most wonderfully, our iMac could suddenly see external disks, again…
… we have zero idea why these things suddenly fixed themselves, and we don’t actually have much faith they will stay fixed, given the things that have happened with our beloved iMac, but we are delighted to be able to use Midjourney, again, and delighted to just be able to do our thing, again…
… we spent time, yesterday, going through all our recent work which we were lucky was still on TimeMachine, (we have another, even older iMac on which we do all our Photoshop work, since Adobe and Apple got together and tilted the playing field, making it impossible, on new computers since about 2020, to use any of the Adobe products anyone had legitimately payed big money for, you now have to pay Adobe vastly more money to use those products without ever owning a physical disk… our 15 year old iMac is running El Capitan, and has been disconnected from the net for the last 5 years) and realised how far behind we’d gotten in our posts, so we’d actually started getting a post ready…
… and here it is! Beautiful punkettes in a delightfully rough style we really like… it suits the subject matter perfectly…
… we particularly like this last one, we’d love to develop this style further… but, before we do that, we still have a heap of other stuff, all different styles, to post.
We are really happy to be doing our thing, again, and, with a shiny, totally up-to-the minute new iMac already payed for and soon-to-be-shipped to us, we are hoping this one will keep working for the two weeks that is supposed to take, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t, but we’ll also be philosophical about it (:
Our beautiful, nine year old iMac crashed! The worst thing is that it was our fault!
We’ve been so obsessed with Midjourney and AI art these last few years, we hadn’t noticed we were filling all our storage with saved images… till we filled all of it, and our iMac crashed because it had zero operating memory.
It took us four days to get it functioning again, but, by then, it was/is so damaged it barely works properly. We managed to move all our images from TimeMachine onto another drive, before our crippled iMac suddenly couldn’t even see external drives, so that was good.
We can’t open installers, so we can’t use Midjourney via it’s app, which has all the functions we use… we can use it on the web, but only using text, and we can’t save images to our dying Mac. Because we can’t save anything, and because our Mac now can’t see external disks, we can’t upload anything to post, hence our first ever, words-only post.
Unless we can retrieve it from TimeMachine, it looks like we lost thousands of albums from our vast music collection, ones we had recorded from cd’s onto our computer, and one’s we’d downloaded back in the day before they made file sharing a crime. Because of the cloud, we still have all our iTunes purchases, which are considerable, but we can only play them via the tinny Mac speakers because the Bluetooth function is only half working, and though it says our Bluetooth speaker is connected, it isn’t.
These last four days have been quite stressful, not just all the brain-churning effort of trying to repair our Mac via Google suggestions using our phone, but the withdrawal from our, literally daily Mj obsession.
So that’s us till we buy a bright, shiny, new iMac… which will be nice, but at NZ$4500, it’s kind of a financial drag we’d hoped to avoid.
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