Where the Strange Path Lead

So… my embrace of the strange, as an antidote to not being able to create flawless beauty, lead me to these images…

… not really sure what to call this style… photorealist/painterly/abstract/collage?… all I know is that I love them…

… they are still very beautiful, but in a wonderful, scruffy, sketchy, textured way…

… I really like them…

… I spent several hours developing them, today…

… and they actually lead somewhere even more delightful, but that’s for the next post (:

Down the Path of Strange

The converse of it being frustratingly hard to produce flawless beauty in Midjourney, is the ease with which you can produce the strange and bizarre. I often, as a kind of palette cleanser, flick out a few bizarre images when the struggle to create beauty gets too hard… these are done with relatively simple prompts, often only one or two words, and always produce bizarre results…

… but sometimes produce surprisingly beautiful results. Midjourney’s natural tendency seems to be for bewilderingly complex images, where any inherent beauty is subsumed by very clever, but far too much, detail…

… I decided to see if I could consistently create beautiful weirdness. It wasn’t easy…

… but every now and then, I got what I consider to be really gorgeous images…

… believe me, for each gorgeous image, there were many really ugly ones…

… but then it would throw out one like the one above, which I think is beautiful. But, because this result is caused by random words designed to cause random results, it’s very hard to then pursue this ‘theme’, because it never ‘was’ a theme, just the blind firing of virtual synapses…

… but I got the one above, trying to recreate the previous one, which totally doesn’t suck…

… and this one (:

Stunning

So, for the last several days, my experience with Midjourney has been pretty frustrating. Midjourney totally sucks at drawing hands, I’ve read, and understand, why this is, but it still makes me never ask it to include hands, I always go for head/shoulders portraits, at the most, head-to-hips. I’ve also read theories that seem correct, that if enough people are concentrating on a certain aspect of Midjourney creation, that aspect begins to appear in everyone else’s work… I suspect this is happening with hands… suddenly, though I never ask, and always exclude any iteration with hands, Midjourney is putting it’s grotesque ‘hands’ in 3 out of four of my iterations (slight exaggeration, but close…) totally ruining otherwise beautiful images. Another irksome Midjourney trait is to put ugly, un-asked-for wiggles and squiggles on faces, another thing it’s been doing more of, lately.

So, imagine my delight, last night, when I decided to try for really clean, stunning beauty, without ugly marks and repulsive hands… and Midjourney complied!…

… I asked it for ‘beautiful east asian, epicanthic eyes, long black hair’… and it started rolling out images like this. These are the purest, most unadulterated beauties I have ever been able to get it to produce. I deliberately got it to start giving them blue eyes, because they are so much more stunning…

… I have had to tweak each of these in Photoshop, but they are as near-perfect as anything I’ve so far been able to produce, and I deliberately left their gorgeous, alien pupils, because, well, why wouldn’t I?…

… so, once again, perseverance has payed off in my Midjourney journey (:

Beautiful Creatures

I just adore the ability Midjourney gives me to literally mass-produce beautiful imagery…

… I don’t think a beginner could produce the consistent level of beauty that I am now producing because, believe me, Midjourney can produce some appalling garbage if you give it the wrong prompts, but I think that most beginners who are persistent, and perhaps as obsessive as I am, wouldn’t take too long to be doing what I am doing…

… I develop my themes, then I experiment with them. I’ve found Midjourney seems to remember my themes, and generally produces the type of imagery I’m going for, but I’ve also found that adding a single new prompt, or a new image for texture, in an attempt to fine-tune my results, can totally stuff up what I had going, and then it seems to lock onto the stuffed-up template, and I literally have to create new ones using the old template, so it can get it’s bearings again…

… on the other hand, Midjourney has often added amazing details I never asked it to add, which I’ve really loved, like with all these Celestial Fae; I’ve never once asked it to add wings!…

… and I loved the fact that it often put them on their heads, which led me to the explanation that Celestial Fae don’t really have ‘wings’, but cosmic energy that humans ‘see’ as wings. So, really, Midjourney prompted me with aspects of these images (: