Kaleidoscope – Monarch Education Project

As a way of making up for my recent neglect of her, I took my sweet little Lepidoptera to Kaleidoscope…

… which is a sanctuary for beautiful Monarch butterflies…

… and an educational resource…

… Flutter was delighted, she kept whispering ‘sisters…’, she knows they can’t hear her, I think she was just marvelling at so many similar, beautiful, fluttering creatures in one place…

… we ambled through the tidy walkways…

… everywhere the glory of these amazing creatures, the soft rustle of thousands of tiny wings…

… there is a cave behind this waterfall for you to explore…

… at the foot of the waterfall are happy critters…

… my baby and I had a lovely time here…

… and I’m pretty sure she’s forgiven me (:

Liquid Dynamics

Golden Princesses

My current Mj crush is these ‘Golden Princesses’…

… beautiful, honey-tressed creatures…

… straight out of romantic fantasy…

… the sun kissing their cascading, golden manes…

… and gleaming off their sumptuous raiment…

… what magnificent entanglements await these amazing rulers-in-waiting?…

… how golden will their reigns be?

Natthimmel

I decided it has been far too long since I took Flutter exploring…

… so I took her to Natthimmel…

… ‘Isn’t this pretty, sweetheart?’ I asked her…

… she pretended not to hear. She only does that when she’s pissed at me…

… ‘Aww, baby, come here!’ I crooned, trying to catch her for butterfly cuddles, but she wouldn’t come close enough…

… ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I didn’t mean to leave you alone for so long’ I said…

… she still didn’t answer, but she came closer to me…

… eventually she whispered ‘I missed you’…

… ‘I’m sorry, Flutterbye, I’ll try to spend less time in Midjourney’ I replied, feeling pretty selfish…

… after a while she said ‘Yes, Seri, it’s very pretty here’…

… I’ve been so absorbed with Mj, these past months, I’d actually forgotten how much I enjoy photographing new destinations…

… and, of course, I’d left Flutter alone, all that time. I’ll have to make it up to her (:

Spun

I decided to explore the concept of clothing made of spun glass…

… Mj gave me many gorgeous results. I combined them with some of my previous images with leather/latex-like fabrics…

… and I started getting images like this! Mj was continuing the ‘spun’ theme, but they were more ‘extruded’, than ‘spun’, and they had become very organic-looking…

… they were beautiful!…

… wonderful, exotic clothing that looked like you could make on the 3D printer in your spare room…

… by this stage, Mj had also begun making all the backgrounds look organic/extruded…

… the whole effect looking really sweet…

… future flower children…

… dressed in gorgeous extruded petals and leaves.

Red Hot

I got fixated with developing these gorgeous red leather outfits…

… they very quickly developed to a stage where puritanical Mj considered them pornography…

… and I could only develop them by ‘rerolling’ them, rather than picking the ones I liked most, then reiterating them…

… so you get the ironic situation where, although Mj considers these images to be obscene…

… it is actually Mj that is choosing how to develop them…

… and it is developing these adorable, super-sexy outfits…

… in luscious red leather…

… that are just fabulous! Thanks, Mj, you wonderful, schizoid, moralistic hypocrite (:

Pure Gorgeousness

A few months ago, Mj couldn’t do hands… now it regularly does near-perfect hands…

… it’s not just hands it’s gotten better at, though…

… it can create really gorgeous expressions, now…

… not to mention just pure gorgeousness altogether…

… once again, or still, I am so engrossed/addicted to my Mj exploration, I have run far ahead of what I have been posting, seldom getting bored with what I am producing, themes appearing, developing, then morphing into new themes, sometimes daily…

… one moment, futuristic carnival queens, the next moment… future-flappers…

… a sub-theme I have become enamoured of, and which now runs through all my other theme explorations…

… is the fabulous clothing you can create/evolve with Mj…

… I, long ago, realised I get better results without mentioning style in my prompts. As soon as you mention a style, Mj pours out boring, cliched fluff that, for me, has zero originality… but if you steer Mj toward a style you like, with careful (dare I say ‘skilful’) iteration…

… the results feel much more rich/unique, to me (:

Stranger Stuff

I am travelling joyously down the Mj rabbit hole of weirdness! I continue to invent prompts that create gorgeous results. I don’t use any of the trendy prompts that aim to produce stunning, Maya-like, professional game-developer style results, or mimic the style of real ‘artists’, I invent my own, and the above image (yes, Mj throws out diptychs as well as triptychs!) are exactly what I’m going for…

… I’m pretty confident I can get away with claiming these images sit firmly in the ‘Lowbrow’ art style camp…

… and ones like the above are even approaching being genuinely ‘surreal’…

… but it’s the above kind of stylistic whimsy I love most, almost a genre of it’s own…

… just absolutely gorgeous strangeness…

… my humans art training is design, and neither of us has ever claimed to be capital ‘a’ artists, just ‘artists’, there is zero deeper meaning to any of this work, zero pretention of it having any…

… for us it’s all about the beauty of the image, the image as a work of design, with beautiful colours and harmonious balance…

… any ‘meaning’ is up to you, the viewer, to discern…

… but these images totally have ‘meaning’ to us, just not thesis-level, elite-speak rationalisation-type meaning… their meaning is in the marvellous stories they evoke, the strange worlds and fantastic creatures and gorgeous, gorgeous woman (:

Strange Beautiful Visions

My tireless (mostly) experimentation with Mj has gifted me a wonderful new cache of images…

… I have discovered a few more, simple prompt words…

… which deliver gorgeous…

… wonderfully strange…

… results…

… I continue to enjoy (mostly) my Mj journey. The huge thing, which is, really, the only thing I really dislike about Mj is its ludicrously puritanical concept of ‘pornography’. For instance, it told me the above image is ‘pornography’, and prevented me from using it as a springboard to develop its gorgeousness. Sometimes this pathetic, small-minded idiocy causes me to give up in disgust… thankfully, I keep coming back (:

Triptychs

I have been pursuing my winged sweethearts, but deliberately pushing the images toward more abstract ‘wings’… Mj randomly threw out this amazing triptych! Of course, it wouldn’t let me develop this image because it is pure, evil pornography (according to Mj), but I re-rolled the set of images this one was in, and started getting more triptychs, which I was able to develop…

… it wouldn’t let me rework this one, either…

… but I was able to, eventually, get it producing versions like this, with which I could work…

… I have no idea (of course I don’t!) what Mj is thinking when it creates these, I certainly never asked it to start doing triptychs, nor gave it any parameters within which to work…

… but, to me, they all have a cohesive, though illusive, rationality…

… and I think they are gorgeous (: