Tag: digital art

Goddesses

My flaming beauties evolved into sun goddesses…

… magnificent creatures…

… who embody the power of the sun…

… not just in a literal sense…

… but in the actual sense…

… of being living vessels of flame, who cannot be consumed by flame. Understandably these beings are treated with considerable respect (:

Flaming Beauty

Sticking with ‘elemental’ themes, I moved from water to fire for these images…

… interestingly, it was much harder to achieve results I liked using this theme, than it was to create underwater dream girls… the AI seems to grasp the concept that one can ‘dream’ of being underwater, but not dream of being on fire, it’s very good, however, at creating burning nightmarish images. It’s all a matter of finding the best ‘prompts’, which basically means finding the best written description that it can ‘understand’. I don’t for a moment think the AI ‘understands’ anything, in fact, spending so much time creating Midjourney imagery that represents what I want it to has taught me it definitely does not ‘understand’ anything. The trick is to lead the AI’s zero comprehension toward the realisation of my intent…

… so while I’m getting there with these flaming beauties, I’ll need to do more work on them before I feel I’ve achieved what I really wanted to achieve.

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 (:

Xaraz Gallery

Veyot invited me to hang my latest work at Xaraz Gallery…

… of course, I said yes. I have just finished this ‘Alien Envoy’ series…

… if you don’t like art that regards you back, these creatures will probably make you uncomfortable…

… I like the way Xaraz Gallery is made, with it’s multiple, glass mezzanines…

… as always, I enjoyed hanging these works, with Flutter’s help, of course…

… wherever you stand in the gallery space…

… at least one of my beautiful, alien ambassadors is watching you.

Snake Bite

I recently started a series of images I am calling the ‘Golden Planet’ series. I have been posting them on my Flickr page. There has been ‘Golden Planet Princess’, and ‘Golden Planet Pilot’. Over the last few days, I created ‘Golden Planet Tourist’. I make these works using multiple images I create in wonderful Midjourney, then I take several of those images into gorgeous Photoshop, and stitch them together with a fair bit of masking, and some touchup painting and a bit of clone stamp magic. I’d almost finished ‘Tourist’, when I decided she’d look more ‘touristy’ with a Golden Planet souvenir brooch, so I went back to Midjourney and had a go at creating one, there, instead of in Photoshop. I was really surprised to get, from my first 4 variations, 3 perfect-looking ‘brooches’!… so I thought, ‘hey, why don’t I whip up some snake bites (lip piercings) for here, too?’… I’d gotten such a precise result for the brooch, I was feeling lucky, so, among a few other (sorry, my secret!’) words, I entered as prompts ‘snake bite, lip piercings’…

… imagine my astonishment when I got four images that looked like this! But astonishment quickly turned to delight! Though nothing like what I’d intended, I found these results incredibly beautiful, if not slightly creepy, but creepy gorgeous! I could never have deliberately made work like this, this was a serendipitous AI artistic bonanza. One of the reasons I enjoy Midjourney is that my work has always been iterative, and the Midjourney process is pretty much entirely iterative… I banged out dozens and dozens of variations on this gorgeous theme, occasionally tweaking the prompts, but not much. I now have several exhibitions worth of this work, which I will begin putting in my galleries, probably tomorrow (: