Tag: Digital Painting

Survivor

She has been alive for millennia, everyone she ever knew, or loved, has been dust for centuries. She once lived in castles, dressed in the finest silks… now she has no home, other than the night. She must keep moving, there is no safety for her anywhere. She is unbroken, she will endure.

White Witch

I read the sad news, the other day, that some dusty old luddites in the US Copyright Office have decided that no-one can copyright AI-generated art because, in their ludicrous, totally uninformed opinions, the creation of such work does not contain ‘sufficient human control’…

… to create these four works, I produced over one hundred iterations, constantly refining them via changed prompts, getting them to where they were what I’d initially visualised…

… then I took them into Photoshop CS5.1, and made many small, but vital, adjustments…

… sure, people can hit ‘play’ and produce instant ‘art’ using Midjourney, and those people can’t really claim to have had much input ( though they have had the same amount of ‘input’ as someone hitting the button on a camera), but for some crusty fools to claim I haven’t had ‘sufficient human control’ of what I create using Mj is the decision of idiots.

Stormy Knights

Once upon a time, several thousand years from now, there were five princesses. These sisters all had ice-blue eyes, and wild hair, black as the night…

… they were all born with never-before known elemental powers…

… they were born into a war that had been raging for Millenia, born into the house of a mighty Queen deeply engaged in that war, they were the born inheritors of that fight, and, as such, were trained as warriors from the day they opened those stunning eyes…

… they were natural warriors, born leaders. Their mastery of electrical energy and the power of the wind earned them the title…

… the Stormy Knights.

Ghost

As I wandered through those broken, empty places, I realised I couldn’t even remember your face…

… you told me that would happen, that once you’d made it to the next level, all trace of you would vanish from this one…

… but I could still remember the space that you used to fill…

… I realised I’d been roaming these places for years, possibly decades…

… even though I didn’t go with you, and could barely remember you, the fact I remembered you at all stopped me from fitting into this plane…

… I’d become a ghost.

Surreality

Midjourney loves surreality, it’s default preference seems to be for the bizarre. Just as it takes practice to get it to produce beautiful cyber-goth courtesans, it takes practice to get it to produce genuinely surreal, as apposed to just plain weird, imagery…

… but I found it well worth persevering with…

… and began producing these gorgeous, surreal, under-water dream scenes…

… you can see elements of my transcendent cyber-elites in these beautiful images…

… I love the ‘painterly’ feel of these works…

… I don’t use any ‘in the style of…’ prompts for my Midjourney work, I did when I first started playing with it, but I soon got bored with the ‘paint-by-numbers’ feel of the results. As these images show, you can achieve very satisfying results, developing your own Midjourney ‘style’.

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 (:

Retrospective Installation

I decided to hang a retrospective installation, featuring some of my digital portrait paintings. Portraits have always been my favourite theme, both for painting, and photography. People who know me will know the work I’ve been showing the last year or so is quite different from what I used to do. I have two digital styles, one I call my ‘comic’ style… I’ve always been interested in sequential art, and, a lot of my early digital paintings, which I started doing around 2012, are in this style…

… they are potential panels for that stunning graphic novel I never did, because I simply could not satisfy my own inner critic about the quality of my work…

… my other style is my ‘photorealistic’ style, where I actually had to learn when to stop polishing, because the paintings end up being so like photographs, it kind of defeats the actual painting process… I still want people to go ‘oh, that’s a painting!’…

… my earlier stuff was pretty dark… dark, but gorgeous, and was always about very scary girls…

… by 2016, even my ‘comic’ work was looking pretty realistic. In 2015-2016, I did a lot of Suicide Girl fan art. My work was easily some of the best on their fan art page, but hardly anyone ‘liked’ them, because I painted portraits, not nudes…

… I also paint singers I adore, and babes from films. These images are just 8 of my paintings from 2013 to 2018. I’ve done a whole lot more. The choice, for these, was to start as early in my life as a digital painter as I could find, the rest was actually dictated by what was easiest to find on my chaotic, two terabyte hard drive (: