02 August

Our output runs well in advance of our posting… we have to remember to post before we get too far ahead! In the one above you can see the beginnings of a style that we named ‘Bucolic Surrealism’; we eventually used an image like this and the only written prompt we gave was ‘bucolic surrealism’, and Mj was off and running with fabulous stuff, but we’ll save that for next post…

… we love these strange worlds, we could happily live in them…

… even in a dream…

… we love the strange, alt-past feel Mj applies so well. As we understand it, that’s because when they first exposed the algorithm to all the art on the net it could vacuum up, there was far more ‘old’ imagery that was either Creative Commons, or just totally un-shielded. Another thing we discovered, recently, is that Mj does astonishingly realistic cats! That must be because of the sheer volume of cat imagery on the net (:

One August

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 (:

Stranger Visions

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 (:

Orange Trees

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.

Lovely Strange

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 (:

The Big Picture

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 (:

The Beautiful 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 (:

First Love

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.

Surreal Journey

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 (:

SpaceWreck

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 (: