We’ve run out of titles involving the concept of surreality, so thought we’d just use the date, which, in itself, will be slightly surreal to most of you, as we are posting from your future…
… the top one has a wonderful 70’s manipulated photo feel to it, while the above is just pure Mj weirdness…
… this one has a 70’s surreal collage feel…
… and this one, again, is pure Mj weirdness…
… and we feel this one is genuinely surreal, a combination of our diligent guiding and Mj weirdness (:
There are so many strange and surreal realities waiting to be created…
… the weird and beautiful…
… the beautifully strange…
… images from dream…
… beautiful imagery that actually isn’t surreal, but is still dream-like in it’s beauty…
… and the just plain fabulous (:
We love these…
… the gorgeous colours…
… the wonderful structures and shapes…
… and the beautiful trees…
… one of the things we appreciate most when creating surreal imagery with Mj, is that it comes up with compositions and content we would simply never have conceived of, even if it’s working from a seed image we gave it, what it does with those images is regularly genius. Many people say things like ‘AI will never replace ‘Art” (said in snooty, self-important voice)… but we think AI is creating it’s own ‘Art’, it’s not ‘replacing’ anything.
We continue to enjoy our embrace of the strange…
… we’d kinda gotten bored with our Fae and our scifi babes…
… we’ve always liked the stranger/darker stuff…
… so it’s no surprise we are enjoying our exploration of the strange/surreal so much…
… the possibilities are endless…
… the trick is to find great prompts that give gorgeous, surreal results…
… and the above are some of those results (:
In our pursuit of the weird and surreal Mj is so good at, we use prompt terms we hope will elicit such results…
… such as ‘she stood in a gallery of strange art’…
… depending on the seed-image we also use with such prompts, which tends to set the ‘flavour’ of the images, we get some amazing results…
… we don’t think these images are technically ‘surreal’…
… they are too beautifully cohesive in their elements…
… but they are certainly wonderfully strange (:
Our exploration into the strange and surreal imagery Mj can produce continues…
… we love this stuff!… each image is a strange story…
… or could easily illustrate a strange story…
… while many are wonderfully strange, many are also just surreal…
… we love the dream-like cohesion of the disparate elements in these ones…
… and the timelessness of the weirdness (:
In some Elven clans, it is a tradition to give a new-born princess a baby dragon…
… new-born Elven princesses and baby dragons are both vanishingly-rare, so this is a seriously-taken tradition. The princess’s parents have to give consent and, of course, the mother of the baby dragon must give hers, as well… but it is also a huge honour for everyone involved…
… because both these fabulous creatures live for thousands of years, they develop an unbreakable bond. Their bond becomes so strong that even the death of one of them cannot keep them from the side of the other, they are bonded for eternity…
… dragons are extremely dense creatures, they weigh much more than they should, it’s one of their many strengths. After a hundred years, her baby dragon, even though dragons grow very slowly, becomes too heavy for the young Elf to cuddle in her arms, even though, as a young Elf, her arms are very strong…
… this doesn’t stop her snuggling up to him or her at every opportunity…
… one of the many aspects of this bond that the princess’s parents have to consider, before giving consent, is that the bond becomes so strong, the dragon becomes the most important creature in the princess’s life… she will never love anyone, or anything, as much as she loves her dragon.
Something that AI art programmes do really well, usually by accident, is the strange and bizarre…
… we have been working away for a few weeks, now, to create beautiful, surreal images…
… they often have VR goggles on the figures, because that’s how Mj interprets most requests that mention ‘alternative reality’, but we don’t mind that, as what we are illustrating here is, in fact, the concept of ‘what is reality?’…
… so we love the idea of our beautiful girls actually being in strange realities at the same time as they are viewing other realities via technology… or is the act of that viewing what is putting them there, in the first place?…
… these are the tip of the iceberg of our exploration of surreal imagery…
… expect more (:
The lone survivor of a downed space-freighter finds herself struggling to shore on an alien planet…
… eventually her feet touch firm ground…
… and she stumbles onto the land…
… she hopes rescue arrives before her air-supply runs out.
We had fun illustrating this little scenario… we couldn’t quite get her face consistent, and couldn’t get her spacesuit consistent at all, other than it being orange… but the stunning sky and the sea are wonderfully consistent (:
We’ve been playing a lot in Dream Machine, lately…
… Dream Machine can be spectacularly uneven (not unlike Mj or Night Cafe, of course…) especially when you use only written prompts, but if you can give it a really good visual prompt (we use images we create in the other two platforms)…
… it can create really gorgeous images…
… like these (: If you asked it (as we have done) to create a pretty, heavily inked Asian woman, in words, you would get images of very ugly Asian woman with a smattering of cheap tattoos (believe us, that’s what we got!)… so we detect an inbuilt bias against beautiful Asians, because it simply can’t grasp that an Asian woman can be beautiful…
… but if you provide it with a prompt image of an actually gorgeous Asian girl, with great ink, it’s away laughing! Dream Machine has a different approach to evolving your images than Mj or Night Cafe have… if left to it’s own devices, it will vaguely change the iterations, but you can also select an image and tell it, in text, how you want to evolve that image. For instance, we originally created this image in Night Cafe, which doesn’t do very good tattoos, and the first few images had floral tattoos, so we asked it to give her ‘mythical beast’ tattoos, and we got these fabulous images…
… but, like all AI, Dream Machine either confabulates, or flat-out lies! We’ve asked it to zoom out from a portrait to a full-body shot, and it’s given us a new set of images and said ‘as you asked, I’ve zoomed out so you can see her full body’ (only it says it in very ‘arty’ terms)… and all the new images are still portrait images!
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