Thought I’d do some more underwater dream girls, another theme I really enjoy pursuing… these ones are all slightly distorted, but I really like them…
… I’ve smoothed over the uglier glitches in glorious Photoshop CS5.1, but not gone out of my way to fix the anatomical distortions that I feel still work, somehow…
… they add to the ‘dream’ aspect.
I’m really loving the more ‘painterly’ results I’m getting…
… by including my own textures with the prompts I add to images I create in Mj (Midjourney)…
… these results are much looser than the ones I was going for, and largely achieving, with my ‘Machine Dolls’, and I’ve actually embraced Mj’s penchant for putting stuff all over faces, rather than trying to fight it…
… which is making everything more ‘organic’ looking, I guess. Anyway, I like the results.
I have made a technique breakthrough that I think is a game-changer for my Mj (Midjourney) work…
… I decided to see what would happen if I paired portraits I’d created in Mj with my own textures (I’ve been making my own textures in Photoshop for over a decade)…
… these are the results! Gorgeous, painterly images…
… I’m really, really excited with this development. When you add a texture image to, in my case, a portrait image…
… Mj doesn’t just put it in the background, it puts it everywhere, in these cases, due to the textures I’ve used, it has created brush-like strokes…
… I asked it for ‘soft side lighting’, and gave it my textures to work with, and it has done a stunning job of softening everything, and producing gorgeous lighting…
… it also started creating these beautiful, pixie-like faces, somehow based on the textures, because none of my original portraits looked this adorable…
… but I’m simply blown away by these wonderful, dreamy, moody images… I make a point of never asking Mj to mimic anyone else’s style, I don’t even stipulate things like ‘painterly’, I just beaver away trying to create my own style… this is really close to what that style has always looked like in my mind…
… count on seeing more (:
As promised, this is how the Machine Dolls evolved into synthetic organisms…
… though still the creations of dreaming AI’s, they began to look less and less ‘human’…
… less like ‘androids’…
… and more like synthetic organisms, synthetic organics… so, after I’d done my brief play with alien plants, I decided to revisit these synthetic organisms, and introduce the alien plant influence…
… this was the result… creatures that suddenly became organic-looking, as apposed to synthetic-organic…
… strange, beautiful plant creatures…
… totally alien…
… yet, somehow, still ‘human’.
As I’ve said, I am totally addicted to Mj (Midjourney), even if it does really irritate me with it’s idiot censorship of my work, and am, literally, producing at least dozens of images a day, often hundreds, so I’m actually far ahead, in evolution of work, of what I’m posting. In my last post I intimated I’d show you how organic-looking the Machine Dolls got, but before that, I want to show you what I’ve done in the last few days. I love the one above, you can see she comes from the Machine Doll lineage, but she’s actually human, not a synthetic creation. This one and the next three, I actually did a bit of work on in Photoshop to get rid of the junk Mj always puts on their faces, I then took them back to Mj, with their lovely, clear faces, and asked it to evolve them… Mj created results that had their faces covered in junk! Grrr! Anyway…
… so this one is only stylistically related to the previous one, but is a totally new direction, one that I really like, it has a kind of fresh simplicity, compared to all the elaborate/ornate Machine Dolls…
… this is the simplest one, but I still really like her. I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning her up, and could do a whole lot more work on her, but I kinda like the rough, sketchy look…
… I really like these new images, their rawness and simplicity. Getting Mj to evolve them like this will be quite annoying, as it continues to put rubbish on their faces. I wish it didn’t do that, it’s such a random, ugly thing… it produces these gorgeous images and totally ruins them by almost always putting crap on their faces… if you are lucky you can get it putting the crap on symmetrically, so it looks like jewellery, but, really, I’d rather it didn’t do it. The thing is, I’ve also managed to get very long runs where it didn’t do it, so, as I say, totally random.
If you are familiar with my posts since I started exploring Mj (Midjourney), you will know my absolute favourite subject matter is beautiful woman, the more exotic/fantastic, the better. You will also know that, due to Mj’s ludicrously puritanical porn filters, I was forced to stop developing those beauties who, although never naked, or pornographic, Mj began declaring them as so as soon as I started creating them in half-body because, horrors… you could see that they had breasts beneath all that armour/circuitry/exotic plumage! Mj would allow me to create these creatures, then wouldn’t allow me to reuse them as prompts to further develop the theme/style, claiming them to be NOT SAFE FOR WEB!!!… which, frankly, is bullshit. So I dabbled in landscapes, which were nice, but soon got dull, I dabbled in geometric shapes, but that quickly began to look like ‘Fractal Art’, something I find, mostly, to be… um… dull…
… so now I’m dabbling in ‘Alien Plants’…
… well, I should say ‘dabbled’… I’m already over them…
… they are really gorgeous, and fun to make, and, like with landscapes, I never get accused of creating pornography…
… but you can only create so many of these before the attraction begins to pale…
… and my desire to create my gorgeous, strange girls keeps resurfacing. The last iterations of my ‘Machine Dolls’ had begun to look like organic beings created synthetically by dreaming AI’s, though their ‘organic-ness’ still had a synthetic look. I wondered if I could revisit them, and incorporate these alien plants, somehow? Want to see how that turned out?
The landscapes continue to evolve…
… places you would expect never to hear the sound of voices…
… places where all you would hear would be the crystal tinkling of mountain stream water flowing over rounded stone, and the wind rustling through autumn leaves…
… until snow fell, and then you would only hear the high keen of that same wind in Winter mode…
… and, often, not even that…
… the ancient valleys hushed and waiting…
… the sky expectant…
… millions of years of solitude…
… building toward the moment…
… when something spectacularly new would happen.
I am continuing to enjoy creating these ancient valleys…
… they are places I would love to visit…
… landscapes lost in time…
… strange and mysterious…
… what will happen next?
Well, it took me about 2 days to get totally bored with making shapes… thought I’d have a go at landscapes…
… it took several hours to start getting results like these, but once I did, I was hooked…
… landscapes have the same potential for stunning imagery that my Machine Dolls did…
… I need to fall in love with my work, in order to put in the hours needed for good results, not just Mj, but my entire life of artistic creation, if I don’t love what I am doing, don’t love the results, I soon lose interest…
… these are pretty gorgeous… far more interesting than shapes/abstract objects…
… and I can see them very quickly leaning toward the fantasial/sci-fi realm of reality (:
As promised, here are some more of my gorgeous Machine Dolls…
… these are the images that Mj/Discord declared to be pornography…
… as you can see, the dolls gradually become less doll-like…
… and more machine-like…
… I had a whole story to go with the progression, but Mj/Discord have made that pointless by preventing me from developing the theme in anything other than a random, irritating way that isn’t how I work…
… I put up with their nonsense for as long as I did because I was still getting good results…
… but the way I was forced to work meant that, beyond a certain stage, I couldn’t further develop my dolls, because Mj/Discord wouldn’t let me take two of these images and combine them, which is how I evolve my iterations, combining the best results to keep getting better results…
… but Mj/Discord forced me to just keep ‘re-rolling’ these results, slightly changing the written prompts to try for evolution of style, but, really, just producing the same result, over and over again…
… which actually got pretty depressing. I managed to evolve them a bit more than this, and will show those images to you soon (:
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