My new direction has produced a surfeit of riches… whole unique series have been created in tandem… this is due to the unpredictable nature of the results of my magic prompt word, but it is then easy to ride each new theme, and mine it’s creativity, by recombining similar images. One theme that surfaced was this one, ‘Dark Dreams’, but there were sub-genres within that theme… the ones I’m showing here are some of the ‘cutesy/dark goth girl’ results…
… these iterations were, no doubt, caused by the fact the initial images I used were from my ‘Battle Doll’ series, which are pretty damned cute and doll-like…
… by recombining the results with my magic word, I progressed this particular iterative branch down the ‘dark gothic cutesy dream/nightmare’ path…
… creating these delightfully dark, but not too creepy, images (:
I have a secret, one-word prompt, that I invented myself, not long after I started playing with Mj. When I feel I’m just churning out the same stuff, or I’ve hit a creative wall, I take two images from whatever iterations I’m currently working on, and put that magic prompt between them…
… the results are always dramatic, but often dramatically crappy… they have what I feel is a very Mj aesthetic, which, I guess, is kind of surreal, but often in a very cheesy, clunky way… not so when I tried this method with my Battle Dolls!…
… the results were astonishingly beautiful…
… I don’t even know how to categorise them… they are kind of surreal…
… but not really ‘surreal’, probably more ‘psychedelic’…
The whole time I’ve been creating sci-fi babes in Mj, I’ve been trying to create cybergothic sci-fi babes as I see them in my mind. My vision of what cybergoth looks like comes from having been (not so much, now that he’s lost his edge) a huge fan of Alastair Reynolds, a few decades ago, when he, as far as I’m concerned, invented the concept…
… Reynolds’s often dreadlocked characters were grim, hard spacers, usually hundreds of years old, most of their organic bit’s swapped out for cybernetic enhancements. Even naked, they were usually stronger than the average planet-bound person, due to mechanically augmented musculature and superior artificial lungs, that kind of thing…
… but once they suited up, these people were like armoured vehicles, their suits bristling with weapons and strength amplification systems…
… everyone was unsmiling and serious in Reynolds’s stories, almost everyone died horribly, no matter how much you’d grown to like them… I’ve been trying to recreate their look for the last year. For some bizarre reason, right up until recently, when you told Mj you wanted ‘cybergoth’, it thought you meant you wanted someone whose face was covered with stupid, pointless crap that totally ruined otherwise gorgeous results… it seems to have largely stopped doing that, which is wonderful, but it also seems to have gotten a better handle on space armour…
… I’m really pleased with these cybergoth babes. Creating them was a whole lot of fun, and these five are just the tip of the iceberg, I created hundreds, trying to refine the results. Mj loses the plot quite quickly if you change your prompts just that little bit too much… I have loads of images, now, of what I would call ‘cybersamurai’, because I tried developing an image that had a helmet that looked like samurai armour, and because the word ‘armour’ was one of the prompts, Mj lurched off into creating futuristic samurai armour, which is cool, but not what I was going for.
I also created a very doll-like, armoured girl, which lead me to explore an entirely new theme, which I have called ‘Battle Dolls’, I’ll post some of them, next, they are super-gorgeous (:
She stands, exhausted, at the centre of a circle of dead men, their bodies already vanishing beneath the fast-falling snow, her arm trembles with the effort to keep holding her sword, the adrenalin she has been running on for the last few hours has all burned away. All she can hear is the howl of the wind. All the sounds of battle seem to have stopped. She doesn’t know where her bodyguard is, nor any of her lieutenants. She wonders to herself… ‘Are we victorious?’
She has been alive for millennia, everyone she ever knew, or loved, has been dust for centuries. She once lived in castles, dressed in the finest silks… now she has no home, other than the night. She must keep moving, there is no safety for her anywhere. She is unbroken, she will endure.