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.
Thought I’d do some more underwater dream girls, another theme I really enjoy pursuing… these ones are all slightly distorted, but I really like them…
… I’ve smoothed over the uglier glitches in glorious Photoshop CS5.1, but not gone out of my way to fix the anatomical distortions that I feel still work, somehow…
… they add to the ‘dream’ aspect.
I’m really loving the more ‘painterly’ results I’m getting…
… by including my own textures with the prompts I add to images I create in Mj (Midjourney)…
… these results are much looser than the ones I was going for, and largely achieving, with my ‘Machine Dolls’, and I’ve actually embraced Mj’s penchant for putting stuff all over faces, rather than trying to fight it…
… which is making everything more ‘organic’ looking, I guess. Anyway, I like the results.
As I’ve said, I am totally addicted to Mj (Midjourney), even if it does really irritate me with it’s idiot censorship of my work, and am, literally, producing at least dozens of images a day, often hundreds, so I’m actually far ahead, in evolution of work, of what I’m posting. In my last post I intimated I’d show you how organic-looking the Machine Dolls got, but before that, I want to show you what I’ve done in the last few days. I love the one above, you can see she comes from the Machine Doll lineage, but she’s actually human, not a synthetic creation. This one and the next three, I actually did a bit of work on in Photoshop to get rid of the junk Mj always puts on their faces, I then took them back to Mj, with their lovely, clear faces, and asked it to evolve them… Mj created results that had their faces covered in junk! Grrr! Anyway…
… so this one is only stylistically related to the previous one, but is a totally new direction, one that I really like, it has a kind of fresh simplicity, compared to all the elaborate/ornate Machine Dolls…
… this is the simplest one, but I still really like her. I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning her up, and could do a whole lot more work on her, but I kinda like the rough, sketchy look…
… I really like these new images, their rawness and simplicity. Getting Mj to evolve them like this will be quite annoying, as it continues to put rubbish on their faces. I wish it didn’t do that, it’s such a random, ugly thing… it produces these gorgeous images and totally ruins them by almost always putting crap on their faces… if you are lucky you can get it putting the crap on symmetrically, so it looks like jewellery, but, really, I’d rather it didn’t do it. The thing is, I’ve also managed to get very long runs where it didn’t do it, so, as I say, totally random.
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 (:
The ‘Machine Dolls’ are very much like the ‘Baroque Nouveau’ cuties… very stylised/doll-like, which was exactly what I was going for, but these cuties are even more augmented than the ‘Cyber Nouveau’ girls…
… in fact these dolls aren’t even ‘human’ any more…
… they are beings created, by AI’s, in the image of ‘Humans’…
… they have gorgeous, synthetic faces…
… attached to glittering machine cores…
… and encased in precision-moulded alloys, energy fields, and spun diamond.
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 (:
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 (:
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 (:
So, for the last several days, my experience with Midjourney has been pretty frustrating. Midjourney totally sucks at drawing hands, I’ve read, and understand, why this is, but it still makes me never ask it to include hands, I always go for head/shoulders portraits, at the most, head-to-hips. I’ve also read theories that seem correct, that if enough people are concentrating on a certain aspect of Midjourney creation, that aspect begins to appear in everyone else’s work… I suspect this is happening with hands… suddenly, though I never ask, and always exclude any iteration with hands, Midjourney is putting it’s grotesque ‘hands’ in 3 out of four of my iterations (slight exaggeration, but close…) totally ruining otherwise beautiful images. Another irksome Midjourney trait is to put ugly, un-asked-for wiggles and squiggles on faces, another thing it’s been doing more of, lately.
So, imagine my delight, last night, when I decided to try for really clean, stunning beauty, without ugly marks and repulsive hands… and Midjourney complied!…
… I asked it for ‘beautiful east asian, epicanthic eyes, long black hair’… and it started rolling out images like this. These are the purest, most unadulterated beauties I have ever been able to get it to produce. I deliberately got it to start giving them blue eyes, because they are so much more stunning…
… I have had to tweak each of these in Photoshop, but they are as near-perfect as anything I’ve so far been able to produce, and I deliberately left their gorgeous, alien pupils, because, well, why wouldn’t I?…
… so, once again, perseverance has payed off in my Midjourney journey (:
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