Courtiers & Courtesans

Midjourney is an iterative process. If you were familiar with my digital art before I discovered Midjourney, you will know that ‘iterative’ could have been my middle name… for that reason, I just love this learning process. I have slowly settled on creating these magnificently-attired dwellers from some dark, far-future feudal realm…

… courtiers and courtesans, and the elites they serve. This latest version of Midjourney excels in producing gorgeous attire for such beings as these…

… and, yesterday, I discovered how to put more than one of these creatures in an image…

… the different clans are, of course, attired in different raiment, giving scope for all kinds of fabulous permutations…

… the problem I now have is choosing my favourites… I have literally produced hundreds of variations on this theme. I just continue to be blown away by how this latest version renders/imagines this kind of sumptuous/exotic clothing…

… not to mention how it now does hair and faces. As with my last post, I have done zero post-production on any of these images… they have some small imperfections, but, on the whole, they are near-perfect.

Amazing Midjourney Journey

I started playing with Midjourney several months ago, buying a subscription to use it. When I first started using it, it performed pretty much as I’d expected it to… everything it did was a rough approximation of what you wanted it to produce, usually bizarrely rough, and often, just plain garbage. I learned how to get it to do approximately what I wanted it to, and sometimes it surprised me with stunning results, but I always had to take the finished work into Photoshop, and spend hours polishing it…

… about 3 weeks ago, I had a break from using it for two weeks. Then, about 3 or 4 days ago, I started playing with it, again. I was totally astonished by my first results, and have been constantly blown away, ever since. I now know this is because while I was away, they rolled out Version 4…

… now the AI produces gorgeous, almost perfect images, almost all the time. When I first started using it, it couldn’t do hair, or eyes, or noses/mouths/teeth… they were often hideously malformed abominations… now they are almost perfect…

… all the pictures in this post are straight from the AI. It still has quirks, such as putting the well-dressed skull behind the gorgeous courtier, above, without my asking it to… but I really love that it did that, and I love the composition, which is another thing it is suddenly better at…

… I liked skull-head so much, I used that image as reference for the next few. You can see, here, that Midjourney still totally sucks at drawing hands, but, in this case, it’s not a problem, as it adds to the creepiness of the skull-head. I used to read all the hand-wringing articles by people whining that AI would do concept artists and their ilk out of jobs, and I used to think they were hysterical luddites…

… I’m not so sure, now.

I have been producing far too much awesome material to keep hanging new work in my SL galleries every few days, but I really want to share this beautiful Midjourney Journey I am on, so I’m going to start posting selected work here. Thanks, Fau, for the suggestion (:

The Immortals

We hung another new exhibition today, this one in our Venezia gallery. This one is called ‘The Immortals’…

… these ladies are the next step up from the ‘Future Elite’ ladies…

… despite the collapse of global civilisation into squalid feudalism, these woman have been the constant beneficiaries of the latest in every kind of scientific and medical advancement; they are effectively immortal, and some of them are thousands of years old…

… imagine if the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg made themselves immortal, how repulsively arrogant they are now? These ladies have had that wealth and power for centuries… I’m guessing they wouldn’t be much like normal people.

Future Elite

Flutter and I hung my first new exhibition for the year, today. It’s called ‘Future Elite’…

… the theme is woman from some far future time, when society is, once again, feudal and clannish…

… these woman are the elite stateswoman, courtiers and warriors of various nations and clans…

… dressed in the latest of styles that such elegant and powerful beings wear…

… all these images were done in Midjourney. I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, and when I started playing with it again, yesterday, I was astonished at how much it has evolved in those two weeks. I couldn’t stop creating gorgeous images, and spent several happy hours doing so…

… when I first started using Midjourney a few months ago, I had to take everything I created into Photoshop to tidy it up, often spending hours on each image. Of these 8 images I have hung here, some of them needed zero alteration…

… the Midjourney bot has dramatically improved it’s ability to render the human face, I am genuinely astonished that it seems to have advanced this far in just a few weeks… as I said to Fau, yesterday, who can say how much better it will be in another two weeks?

The Adventurers Tiki Lodge

For our last adventure of the year, Flutter and I visited ‘The Adventurers Tiki Lodge‘…

… this destination is billed as a ‘love letter to Tiki Culture’, but is also very much a homage to the Exotica and Lounge movements…

… the colours are gorgeously rich and lush. One of the first things we noticed was this small volcano that was oozing lava…

… everything here is wonderfully retro-exotica…

… with fabulous 1950’s-60’s typography…

… we hired a jet-ski to go out and look at the Nautilus submarine we’d seen cruising in the bay…

… while we were out there, the little volcano erupted…

… it was really beautiful, and was still going when we got back on shore…

… flutter found it a bit scary because she said ‘that’s how the world ends’… one of her more cryptic utterances, but the eruption died down, and she went back to her usual, happy little self…

… we rounded off our visit lounging by the fire.

Flutter and I wish you all a very happy new year (:

Frozen

Yesterday, my little bio-mechanoid Lepidoptera and I, visited Frozen…

… this is a mostly minimalist, winter wonderland, with just the right balance of cute clutter…

… the biggest amount of which is in the build’s only internal space…

… there are many cats, large and small, here…

… if you know us, you know these minimalist environments, with big skies, and wide horizons…

… are our favourite kinds of place. The moon, here, is so minimalist, it is featureless…

… we love the colour palette, here…

… there’s plenty of of beautiful, icey-blue, winter scenery for photo-ops…

… a pretty place to visit (:

The Walk of Art at Lawst Paradise

I took Flutter to see the butterflies at Lawst Paradise, yesterday. It’s been nearly 5 years since I was here, last… an SL eternity. I saw it advertised, recently, in the destination guide… I’d assumed it was long-gone, so was delighted to see that wasn’t the case. You land on the bottom floor of tiered galleries featuring written word and neon sculpture. If you know me, you know I’m not interested in the written word as art, so, as always, I have not captured any of the word stuff, but there’s lots here, if that’s what you are into… the theme is peace and happiness, and love… who could fault such a theme?…

… you make your way up the levels, viewing the various themes. This is, by far, my favourite level, and the one I brought Flutter to see. It is filled with gorgeous, neon sculpture…

… and beautiful, singing butterfly creations. Their voices are an incredibly soothing chiming sound. You can take free copies of them. When I found this place, all those SL years ago, I took a few, then came back and took a few more… they have been in the garden by my home gallery ever since, and are indelibly stamped in my mind as an essential part of my little world in Jormundgandr. Flutter was as enamoured of them as I knew she’d be…

… we lounged around, listening to the crystal chimes, for a while…

… then continued up, through the various levels of pretty things…

… up and up we went…

… stopping to ride a swing in the stars…

… stopping to look at each bright thing…

… enveloped in very peaceful, rich, neon colours…

… till, at last, we could see the final staircase, winding it’s way through the stars, above our heads…

… and we ascended to the last level.

Flutter and I wish you all peace and rest, these next few days, whatever your beliefs (:

WQNC

We visited WQNC, today. You land in the shallows of an ocean, wondering where the hell you are…

… then you see you are standing in front of a large, derelict building, on a tiny island…

… the sky, here, is magnificent…

… you enter the ruin via this corridor. The ‘teleport’ sign does absolutely nothing, teleporting you about a meter, so I guess it’s someones idea of humour…

… inside is quite photogenic…

… in that derelict, yet still lit, neon, Asian ruin kinda way…

… there’s actually not much to see, here…

… it’s a short walk to nowhere, really…

… the only enterable space is filled with sleazy, adolescent, Asian manga garbage, which kinda ruins the whole place, unless you are into that shit, then there probably isn’t enough for you.