Edit

So, after looking at this image a bit longer, once I’d posted it, I decided that, no, the Mj anatomical weirdness I’d left in didn’t make it ‘dream-like’… in fact, it made it nightmarish…

… so I spent a few more minutes, 15 at most, and fixed it, kinda embarrassed by my initial laziness.

The Primordial Valley

Well, it took me about 2 days to get totally bored with making shapes… thought I’d have a go at landscapes…

… it took several hours to start getting results like these, but once I did, I was hooked…

… landscapes have the same potential for stunning imagery that my Machine Dolls did…

… I need to fall in love with my work, in order to put in the hours needed for good results, not just Mj, but my entire life of artistic creation, if I don’t love what I am doing, don’t love the results, I soon lose interest…

… these are pretty gorgeous… far more interesting than shapes/abstract objects…

… and I can see them very quickly leaning toward the fantasial/sci-fi realm of reality (:

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: 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 (:

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 (:

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…