Dark Dreams

My new direction has produced a surfeit of riches… whole unique series have been created in tandem… this is due to the unpredictable nature of the results of my magic prompt word, but it is then easy to ride each new theme, and mine it’s creativity, by recombining similar images. One theme that surfaced was this one, ‘Dark Dreams’, but there were sub-genres within that theme… the ones I’m showing here are some of the ‘cutesy/dark goth girl’ results…

… these iterations were, no doubt, caused by the fact the initial images I used were from my ‘Battle Doll’ series, which are pretty damned cute and doll-like…

… by recombining the results with my magic word, I progressed this particular iterative branch down the ‘dark gothic cutesy dream/nightmare’ path…

… creating these delightfully dark, but not too creepy, images (:

New Direction

I have a secret, one-word prompt, that I invented myself, not long after I started playing with Mj. When I feel I’m just churning out the same stuff, or I’ve hit a creative wall, I take two images from whatever iterations I’m currently working on, and put that magic prompt between them…

… the results are always dramatic, but often dramatically crappy… they have what I feel is a very Mj aesthetic, which, I guess, is kind of surreal, but often in a very cheesy, clunky way… not so when I tried this method with my Battle Dolls!…

… the results were astonishingly beautiful…

… I don’t even know how to categorise them… they are kind of surreal…

… but not really ‘surreal’, probably more ‘psychedelic’…

… whatever they are, they are gorgeous (:

Are We Victorious?

She stands, exhausted, at the centre of a circle of dead men, their bodies already vanishing beneath the fast-falling snow, her arm trembles with the effort to keep holding her sword, the adrenalin she has been running on for the last few hours has all burned away. All she can hear is the howl of the wind. All the sounds of battle seem to have stopped. She doesn’t know where her bodyguard is, nor any of her lieutenants. She wonders to herself… ‘Are we victorious?’

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.

Ophelia’s Recurring Dream

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.

Scape Progression

The landscapes continue to evolve…

… places you would expect never to hear the sound of voices…

… places where all you would hear would be the crystal tinkling of mountain stream water flowing over rounded stone, and the wind rustling through autumn leaves…

… until snow fell, and then you would only hear the high keen of that same wind in Winter mode…

… and, often, not even that…

… the ancient valleys hushed and waiting…

… the sky expectant…

… millions of years of solitude…

… building toward the moment…

… when something spectacularly new would happen.

Beautiful Creatures

I just adore the ability Midjourney gives me to literally mass-produce beautiful imagery…

… I don’t think a beginner could produce the consistent level of beauty that I am now producing because, believe me, Midjourney can produce some appalling garbage if you give it the wrong prompts, but I think that most beginners who are persistent, and perhaps as obsessive as I am, wouldn’t take too long to be doing what I am doing…

… I develop my themes, then I experiment with them. I’ve found Midjourney seems to remember my themes, and generally produces the type of imagery I’m going for, but I’ve also found that adding a single new prompt, or a new image for texture, in an attempt to fine-tune my results, can totally stuff up what I had going, and then it seems to lock onto the stuffed-up template, and I literally have to create new ones using the old template, so it can get it’s bearings again…

… on the other hand, Midjourney has often added amazing details I never asked it to add, which I’ve really loved, like with all these Celestial Fae; I’ve never once asked it to add wings!…

… and I loved the fact that it often put them on their heads, which led me to the explanation that Celestial Fae don’t really have ‘wings’, but cosmic energy that humans ‘see’ as wings. So, really, Midjourney prompted me with aspects of these images (: