Machine Dolls Evolved

My output since I hit my stride with Midjourney (Mj) has been astonishing. Like I’ve said, I have an addictive personality, and am seriously addicted to Mj! The whole time I was posting the ‘Exquisite’ series, which ended with the ‘Machine Dolls’…

… I was evolving those dolls, till they looked something like this…

… I seriously adore these creatures…

… and totally love evolving them to be these gorgeously detailed, richly coloured/textured images…

… the process isn’t without frustration, though…

… as, due to Mj’s puritanical double standards, it allows me to create these images, but doesn’t then allow me to use these same images as prompts, claiming them to be pornography… a judgement that blows my mind. So the only way I can evolve this style, is to continually ‘re-roll’ from my initial prompts that snuck past Mj’s ludicrous ‘porn’ filter…

… so any evolution is extremely incremental, and, really, quite random…

… I actually think the Mj bot understands what results I’m after, but is hamstrung by the Sunday School teachers who wrote it’s filters…

… anyway, believe me, the Machine Dolls get much more sophisticated than this post, which is work from several days ago (:

Exquisite: Machine Dolls

The ‘Machine Dolls’ are very much like the ‘Baroque Nouveau’ cuties… very stylised/doll-like, which was exactly what I was going for, but these cuties are even more augmented than the ‘Cyber Nouveau’ girls…

… in fact these dolls aren’t even ‘human’ any more…

… they are beings created, by AI’s, in the image of ‘Humans’…

… they have gorgeous, synthetic faces…

… attached to glittering machine cores…

… and encased in precision-moulded alloys, energy fields, and spun diamond.

Exquisite: Cyber Nouveau

I’ve called these ones ‘Cyber Nouveau’…

… slightly more hard-edged/cyber…

… and just slightly less cutesy/stylised…

… than the ‘Baroque Nouveau’ cuties…

… but still, very much, showing the Nouveau influence…

… you’ll see that, as this ‘Exquisite’ theme develops, it is trending ever more toward my favourite style/subject matter, which is, of course… SiFi!

Exquisite: Baroque Nouveau

These ones are a lot more stylised, with a nouveau feel…

… I deliberately went for this doll-like perfection…

… but you can’t use the prompt ‘doll-like’ in Midjourney, because it instantly makes them into creepy, Victorian dolls, with huge eyes, and fat cheeks, like ‘Bride of Chucky’ dolls…

… not what I was going for, at all…

… I was going for unreal perfection…

… in stylised portraits…

… richly detailed…

… with gorgeous colour…

… and I’m fairly satisfied that I achieved that result (:

Exquisite: Wings

Following my recent foray into tainted beauty, which was a deliberate circuit-breaker from my constant mission to produce images of beautiful beings, I suddenly found myself producing what I can only describe as exquisitely gorgeous images… exquisitely beautiful beings, and exquisitely rendered detail…

… I realised it is next to impossible to get Midjourney to create faces and not put irritatingly ugly marks on them, but I learned how to guide it toward making those marks symmetrical/ornamental…

… with practice, you can get Midjourney to consistently produce amazing detail…

… I have an addictive personality, and am totally hooked, plus, my work has always been iterative, so those two things…

… obsessive involvement, and iterative work flow, they have, for me, turned out to be perfect for playing in Midjourney…

… as someone who is actually very capable of creating good digital art from scratch, what I am doing with Midjourney seems almost too good to be true… the ability to produce almost too much amazing art!… I find it incredibly enjoyable/fun…

… so, since the ‘Weird Apocalypse’ series, I have created a plethora of exquisitely gorgeous imagery. I have collected the best of them into rough categories, and will do the next few posts using those categories…

… this one is ‘Wings’… stunningly beautiful winged creatures…

… if the Weird Apocalypse occurred anywhere near these beauties, they just totally ignored it (:

Zombie Beach Bunnies

Toward the end of my Beach Bunnies/Weird Apocalypse project, I created these Zombie Bunnies. The Weird Apocalypse effected the bunnies in different ways. These ones didn’t get turned into actual bunny-analogs, unfortunately for them, the apocalypse just killed them, but in such a way that their brains didn’t realise it…

… this left them roaming the beaches, still. Although they were no longer their sharp-witted selves, they were still smart enough to notice that the sun was causing their previously gorgeous bodies to rapidly decay…

… so they all moved into the shallows, just off the beaches they so loved. They now spend their days eating fish, and roaming around, longing for volleyball games, and dance parties they can no longer go to…

… you can see these sad, decayed beauties at my Soho gallery (:

Show at The Place

Fau arranged for her and I to show some of our work at sabr Zirgar’s The Place. Sabr owns the venue, she is also a light show artist. For the opening, she put on an amazing light show. The dj was Senka Beck. This was only my second ever light show, and the first that was a dance party, I didn’t even know I wasn’t allowed my facelight, without which I feel naked, and without which it is very hard to get decent pictures. Also, with a framerate of around 12fps, I couldn’t capture everything as well as I’d have liked to…

… but I gave it a shot. As this is really my first dance/lightshow, I have nothing to compare it to…

… but it was astonishingly complex…

… I actually didn’t notice how long the show lasted, but I’d say at least 40 minutes, and it was this complex the whole time…

… it must take hours to choreograph something like this, as well as match it to the beats…

… a lot, perhaps all of the laser lights came from these little drones, they were scattered all around the space…

… Fau’s video’s were on screens in the outside dance area…

… my contribution, which I did specially for this show, is on the ground floor… it’s called ‘Serious Young Women’…

… on the second floor, there is some more AI art by another artist (:

Weird Apocalypse

The Weird Apocalypse had many strange effects on beach bunnies. Some mutated into actual bunnies, though very unusual bunnies, but some, at the extreme end of the spectrum, became something literally out of this world…

… while some were still vaguely tethered to a beach plane of existence…

… most were catapulted so far off the spectrum, that being a human beach bunny wasn’t even a memory for them…

… though they still bore a bunny-like visage, they were now outside known reality, entirely remade…

… while some became lost cyphers scribbled on the board of trans-dimensional catastrophe, a few grabbed their potential with both paws…

… and boldly tuned their incredible ears toward their own, amazing, future reality.

Mutant Asian Beach Bunnies

Of course, whatever the apocalyptic event that so transformed the Western beach bunnies was, it also transformed the Eastern Beach bunnies, causing them, at a minimum, to all grow ears…

… the apocalypse affected the weather, too, making the beach a pretty grim place for the bunnies…

… but these were creatures of habit…

… and a bit of weirdness wasn’t going to stop them digging in the sand, searching for heads of lettuce…

… or just chilling and being beautiful…

… I really love this one, it has an ‘old masters’ feel, and a definite ‘Mona Lisa’ vibe (:

Beach Bunnies of the Apocalypse

So, while experimenting with rougher-edged beauty, I took two of my images from the previous post, and combined them using the prompt ‘plastic beach bunny’… I had no thought whatsoever of creating, well, beach bunnies… rather, I just made up a phrase, like ‘fish on a bike’, to see what happened! Of course, Midjourney is extremely literal, but, still, I was delighted when it started churning out gorgeous, manga-like beach bunnies…

… but still with a good dollop of strangeness…

… the hilarious aspect of these bunnies, is that Discord/Midjourney consider them porn! When I try to combine two of these images, to pursue a particular aspect, Discord/Midjourny shrieks NSFW!!, and won’t allow me to use the images it just allowed me to create! Yet I can keep creating them by re-rolling my original prompt…

… Discord/Midjourney has a bizarrely puritanical idea of what porn looks like… apparently porn is bare shoulders and a bit of cleavage, bikini’s are considered total filth…