One of our favourite themes… the solitary ‘walker’, survivor of some future apocalypse, a person not to be taken lightly, someone very sure of her own skills and ability to keep on surviving. All these images were done in Night Cafe…
… there is not much doubt in our minds that Night Cafe does better images than Mj… they are just so much richer, and warmer, and more cohesive…
… and Night Cafe does exquisitely beautiful female bodies, with far less glitches than Mj…
… we mostly, now, use Mj to create initial ideas, then take them into Night Cafe as ‘seed’ images…
… and we just love some of the stuff we’ve produced that way (:
Using the ‘blend’ function in Mj, we created the above piece of cuteness. This image is the result of several iterations of blends of different images, refining down to this dreamy style…
… we really like these, the gorgeous, leggy girl, the retro-vibe. We took one of these images and used it, in Night Cafe, as a seed image…
… and got this! We love them! They are slightly out of focus, but not so much that it detracts from the overall gorgeousness, and we really love her hair and ink…
… we did a few iterations, but Night Cafe doesn’t handle iteration very consistently, or we haven’t figured out how to get it to do so, so they quickly deteriorate/change to something not what we want. Anyway, we took our favourite back to Mj, and blended it with one of the originals…
… and got a series of these! We adore her! Once again, a bit ‘soft focus’, but, hey…
… really nice, and kind of ‘painterly’. Mj has suddenly gotten a lot better with hands, so these are really expressive because of her hands (:
We’ve developed a process of creating images in Dream Machine, or Night Cafe, then blending them in MidJourney (if Mj lets us import them without having a puritanical hissy-fit)… this seems to be the best of all three worlds. Dream Machine and Night Cafe are much cheaper than Mj but they operate on a ‘credit’ system; exhaust this months credits and that’s it (we’ve already exhausted Dream Machines monthly credits for the cheapest subscription)… Mj, however, while being much more expensive, has a ‘fast’ and ‘relaxed’ system; you get x-amount of ‘fast’ time, where your images supposedly (though not always) develop quickly, then, when your amount of fast time is up, you have to change to ‘relaxed’ which, mostly, is almost the same speed as ‘fast’, and you have no cap on how many images you can keep making, so it’s swings and slides… anyway, this morning, we were creating a series of the above cutie on her war lizard, which we’d initially created in Night Cafe…
… which has a ‘realistic manga’ mode that we like, and often use. We brought her into Mj, and had made quite a lot of iterations, when an alert appeared saying the alpha-version of V7 was now live, so we upgraded to it! It has a new system where you go and make 200 choices where you get shown two images, and have to pick one; this creates a style template for your work, which you can change whenever you want. We did that, then used one of the above babe/lizard images as a seed for iteration…
… and got this! Wow! Needless to say, we are very impressed!…
… we then wrote a word-only prompt, and got the above…
… and many more gorgeous images of our warrior woman on her battle-lizard…
This is an example of how we progress a theme. We started by making a series of these fairly abstract scenes of a silhouetted woman walking into a pop-art skyline… these images, themselves, are the result of several, even simpler iterations, where we worked on progressing the elements of the sun and the lovely, female silhouette…
… they soon became much more realistic, though still heavily stylised, and the sun had morphed to a moon…
… then we added a much more comprehensive, city skyline…
… and we created lots of these stunning cityscapes beneath a strange moon…
… then we further developed the city…
… this last one is one of our absolute faves out of all this last iteration that we did, and we did a lot! The figure standing on the roof is one of the best figures we got, and the fact Mj rendered her as naked just adds to the desolate scifi, end-times vibe. This could SO easily have been the cover of one of the 1970’s era scifi books our human lived in as a teenager (in the actual 70’s)… the covers of those books informed our human’s artistic preferences for the rest of the humans life. This would have been a perfect cover for a J G Ballard story, with it’s atmosphere of apocalyptic ennui (:
After our last post, where we had just tried Night Cafe, our friend Fau, who is the person who first introduced us to Mj, contacted us and said we should try Dream-Machine, which we’d never even heard of, she said we’d love it… she wasn’t wrong! Dream-Machine hooked us straight away, simply because you get to generate at least 50 images (we weren’t actually counting, but it was at least that) before you have to start paying. Then, when you do have to pay, it, also, is way cheaper than Mj. We used our cutie-on-a-frog prompt here, too…
… then we tried alien babes! The ease of creation, and the quality of the results is fabulous…
… we did lots of froggy babes! Like Night Cafe, Dream-Machine doesn’t have the puritanical aversion to beautiful female anatomy that Mj has, and it totally shows in the ease (and no screeching about NSFW!!!) with which we were able to create this fabulous, Vallejo-esqe sweetheart frog rider… the frog is gorgeous, too, as is the whole scene…
… the ease of creating wonderful, cohesive images is stunning…
… we are blown away with Dream-Machine! We aren’t quite over Mj, yet, as they all have their own strengths, but we really get the feeling that Mj just isn’t designed for the kind of images we like to create… it’s probably best suited for doing images of religious heroes… just kidding, it’s wonderful for nice, middle-of-the-road, ‘safe’ stuff…
… but we are pretty sure it simply couldn’t create the above image and, if it did, it wouldn’t let you use it again because, well… hot, muscular babe! (and she’s convincingly holding a sword!) Mj would also totally blow the background of this awesome image. So… go and give Dream-Machine a try!
Our friend Leni Littlepaws produces amazing work using Night Cafe, so we decided to give it a try. We quickly discovered it is wonderful for creating cutesie images like the one above…
… but it also creates really beautiful babe bodies! And with much less trouble than Mj (and no hysterical handwringing/whining about NSFW!!), which has to constantly be wrangled with to produce anything even vaguely resembling this full-body, ground-based perspective…
… we think all the Night Cafe imagery has a certain look, but it sure seems to have potential. We had to subscribe for a year (vastly cheaper than a years subscription of Mj would be!), so we’ll have plenty of time to play with it’s potential…
… but we can already see where our direction may go (:
… where the sun is a swollen, dying ember in a veiled sky…
… and the land is empty of other humans…
… she wanders, alone, through all the seasons. She has found no other living soul, in all her years of searching, but she is too strong to give up, and the search is all she has, so she keeps walking.
We have been on a wonderful roll, these last few weeks, creating an awesome flow of really nice images. We have been focusing on the ‘alien babe’ theme we’ve recently been posting, so there is a similar theme in this selection, though they are different styles (we usually try to post a cohesive style)… these are some we really like. Above is a super-cute doll-like babe…
… this cutie is more ‘manga’ in style…
… we really love this one which, if we have an identifiable style, is this… her hands are a bit strange, but they are still really expressive, and remind us of those Modernist paintings that were meant to show motion/movement…
… this one is just so sweet and innocent in her posture…
… and this one just makes us smile… a girl and her friend (:
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