Ooops…

It turns out that now that we lost the habit of regular posting (admittedly due to shitty cancer and all the problems it’s caused us), we simply cannot get it back…

… we will do our best to, at least, make a few more posts, as it looks like we could live a few more months…

… but we just can’t make any promises, now…

… we are still, mostly, managing our daily 1 hour walks, but even they have been a bit erratic recently, though more due to state of mind than physical inability…

… we are still enjoying our garden, and we spend a lot of time reading…

… speaking of our garden, the spring crops are now coming on… we are so glad we planted and tended them as, in all honesty, we were just going through the motions because it’s what we’ve always done, and we didn’t really expect to live to see them begin to come to fruition.

From the Archives II

From the Archives

As we explained, a while back, we went cold-turkey on AI art about a year ago…

… we have thousands of images, all neatly filed…

… most of which we automatically saved with barely a look, such was the pace that we created them, on wild, magical rolls of image-creation, always wanting that ‘better’ one…

… we were so immersed in the process, we hardly noticed that most of them were pretty good (:

Lovely Strange

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 (:

The Big Picture

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 (:

Pretty in Ink

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!

Cross-platform Fun

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 (:

Version 7 of MidJourney!

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…