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.
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’.
After they have lived for a thousand years or so, the bodies of the Elite begin to succumb to entropy that no amount of bio-engineering can fix, more and more mutation effects them. They start to replace their decaying body parts with cybernetic parts…
… they begin to look less and less like humans, and more and more like machines…
… as another thousand years go by, their organic minds subtly change… even though they are still the minds of humans, they are no-longer human, they are transcendent. They begin to embrace their transcendence…
… turning themselves into gorgeous, humanoid art forms…
… and though vanity makes them keep a human visage…
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.
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 (:
Seraphim has finished her second Alita painting. It took a bit longer than she thought it would… there was a lot of colour blending involved. As always, she could keep polishing it, but decided it was time to stop, while it still looked like a painting.
Seraphim has started her second Alita painting. This one is called ‘300 Year Stare‘. This is sweet little Alita channelling her 300-year-old Berserker-class skills and training, near the end of the film, seriously-dangerously housed in the 300-year-old Berserker-class body she found in the downed Martian space craft, a body she was clearly designed to inhabit… this is when she deals some serious damage to all the assholes who have been trying to kill her and those close to her… the assholes do not walk away, this time.
Sweet, friendly, happy teenage android Alita rolls up to the starting line for the trials, turns to the guy beside her and asks ‘How you doin’?” She’s such a sweet kid. A few seconds later, she gets a heads-up from her ‘father’, telling her it’s a setup, all the people gathered around her are bad people… neither of them know that every single one of these people are there expressly for the purpose of murdering Alita… when she gets this warning, teenage Alita becomes 300-year-old Alita, the killing machine, and all those killers become doomed.
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