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…
… 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.
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.
Born the legitimate heir to her warrior father’s throne, the only girl, with five younger brothers, she has had to fight her entire, young life, just to survive to inherit that throne…
… from an infant, she has had to learn to know when she is being manipulated, who she can trust, where she can and can’t walk alone…
… she has lead warriors into bloody battle and survived, she has even had to fight some of her own brothers to the death, and seen the surprise in their arrogant, entitled eyes as they died…
… still young, she is now the Queen. Long may she reign.
Once again, we are running way ahead of our posts, with our progress, so here’s a condensed catchup! We have found that the ‘blend’ option in MidJourney often rewards brave (seemingly incompatible) blends, with stunning, unexpected results. We got the above image (and a whole series of them) by blending one of our scifi babes from a year or so ago, with one of our recent spaceship images… we’d hoped it would put her in the foreground, ship in the background, instead it did this, which was entirely unexpected, but we can see how it came up with it, based on the two images used…
… although the babe we used wasn’t aquatic at all, she had very fluid lines and colours, and you can see Mj has turned the spaceships into fish-like objects, and has used the amazing lighting from the spaceship images to light these gorgeous, underwater scenes of weirdness…
… we often develop similar scenes in tandem. Above is one of a whole series we did of spectacularly panoramic beach scenes with spaceships in them, we were doing these at the same time we were doing the even more dramatic spaceship scenes…
… we really liked them, but felt the ones we posted were slightly more interesting…
… this is what happened when we blended some of the top two images with some of the panoramic spaceship images! We couldn’t believe our luck! We didn’t know what to expect, but totally didn’t expect anything this beautiful…
… these are just the tip of the iceberg of what we have done using this theme. Although capital ‘A’ art oiks would disagree, we think these are the closest thing to ‘art’ we have ever produced, using Mj (:
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