Tag: digital portrait

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!

A Selection

Here is a random selection of our recent frenzied Mj output… which we have toned back, as we can feel the twinges of returning RSI, and we totally don’t want that to flare up, again…

… as with our last Mj binge, we have created far more gorgeous images than we know what to do with…

… each image is the tip of a cascading iceberg of possibilities, which we have a lot of trouble not following, so we wind up going down avenues we never intended to follow…

… often a wonderful image will simply not yield a similar result, and some of these images are pretty much one-off flukes we couldn’t pursue further…

… but we love all these images…

… all the wonderful colours and textures.

Pure Gorgeousness

I kind of hit the wall, with my satisfaction with my Mj output, about a month ago…

… admittedly, I also drastically reduced the intensity of my addiction…

… to the the point where it is now September, and I have yet to run out of ‘fast’ render time from August…

… for the first time, ever… usually I have blasted through my fast time, half way through the month…

… so, whether I hit a wall, or I just haven’t been putting in the grind, I have felt the standard of my recent output has been pretty mediocre…

… right up until a few days ago…

… when I just got on a roll (still at a newly casual pace) and started producing these absolute beauties…

… I am in love with them all…

… pure gorgeousness (:

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.

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.