We continue to enjoy our embrace of the strange…
… we’d kinda gotten bored with our Fae and our scifi babes…
… we’ve always liked the stranger/darker stuff…
… so it’s no surprise we are enjoying our exploration of the strange/surreal so much…
… the possibilities are endless…
… the trick is to find great prompts that give gorgeous, surreal results…
… and the above are some of those results (:
In our pursuit of the weird and surreal Mj is so good at, we use prompt terms we hope will elicit such results…
… such as ‘she stood in a gallery of strange art’…
… depending on the seed-image we also use with such prompts, which tends to set the ‘flavour’ of the images, we get some amazing results…
… we don’t think these images are technically ‘surreal’…
… they are too beautifully cohesive in their elements…
… but they are certainly wonderfully strange (:
We’ve been playing a lot in Dream Machine, lately…
… Dream Machine can be spectacularly uneven (not unlike Mj or Night Cafe, of course…) especially when you use only written prompts, but if you can give it a really good visual prompt (we use images we create in the other two platforms)…
… it can create really gorgeous images…
… like these (: If you asked it (as we have done) to create a pretty, heavily inked Asian woman, in words, you would get images of very ugly Asian woman with a smattering of cheap tattoos (believe us, that’s what we got!)… so we detect an inbuilt bias against beautiful Asians, because it simply can’t grasp that an Asian woman can be beautiful…
… but if you provide it with a prompt image of an actually gorgeous Asian girl, with great ink, it’s away laughing! Dream Machine has a different approach to evolving your images than Mj or Night Cafe have… if left to it’s own devices, it will vaguely change the iterations, but you can also select an image and tell it, in text, how you want to evolve that image. For instance, we originally created this image in Night Cafe, which doesn’t do very good tattoos, and the first few images had floral tattoos, so we asked it to give her ‘mythical beast’ tattoos, and we got these fabulous images…
… but, like all AI, Dream Machine either confabulates, or flat-out lies! We’ve asked it to zoom out from a portrait to a full-body shot, and it’s given us a new set of images and said ‘as you asked, I’ve zoomed out so you can see her full body’ (only it says it in very ‘arty’ terms)… and all the new images are still portrait images!
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…
… once again, Mj leads the way!
As you can see, we are still developing the big moon concept…
… and the fabulous, filmy fabrics, billowing from the equally fabulous bodies of the gothic belles…
… we really love these…
… so moody and evocative (:
(:
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 (:
My sisters, and I, have lived in these ruins since we were about 12 years old. There are fifty of us. We all look the same…
… we all remember walking here after we escaped the facility we were born and raised in. It wasn’t really an ‘escape’, though… over a period of days, all the guards, and scientists, and teachers, just… died. They all got sick, and they all died. We didn’t. We are all very intelligent, and very strong. We all decided to leave, and we walked several days through a blighted wasteland, till we came to this ruined city…
… there are enough canned foods, and ground water, here, to keep us alive for a few more years. We don’t know what happened, here, but we think it was a long time ago, longer than when the people at the facility all died…
… we have seen no other people in the six years we have been here. It is getting harder, and more dangerous, to find the supplies of preserved foods…
… soon we will have to think about moving out. We have sent scouting parties out, over the years, and we know there are other ruined cities, several days walk from here…
… we will have to walk to one of them.
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