First Love

In some Elven clans, it is a tradition to give a new-born princess a baby dragon…

… new-born Elven princesses and baby dragons are both vanishingly-rare, so this is a seriously-taken tradition. The princess’s parents have to give consent and, of course, the mother of the baby dragon must give hers, as well… but it is also a huge honour for everyone involved…

… because both these fabulous creatures live for thousands of years, they develop an unbreakable bond. Their bond becomes so strong that even the death of one of them cannot keep them from the side of the other, they are bonded for eternity…

… dragons are extremely dense creatures, they weigh much more than they should, it’s one of their many strengths. After a hundred years, her baby dragon, even though dragons grow very slowly, becomes too heavy for the young Elf to cuddle in her arms, even though, as a young Elf, her arms are very strong…

… this doesn’t stop her snuggling up to him or her at every opportunity…

… one of the many aspects of this bond that the princess’s parents have to consider, before giving consent, is that the bond becomes so strong, the dragon becomes the most important creature in the princess’s life… she will never love anyone, or anything, as much as she loves her dragon.

Surreal Journey

Something that AI art programmes do really well, usually by accident, is the strange and bizarre…

… we have been working away for a few weeks, now, to create beautiful, surreal images…

… they often have VR goggles on the figures, because that’s how Mj interprets most requests that mention ‘alternative reality’, but we don’t mind that, as what we are illustrating here is, in fact, the concept of ‘what is reality?’…

… so we love the idea of our beautiful girls actually being in strange realities at the same time as they are viewing other realities via technology… or is the act of that viewing what is putting them there, in the first place?…

… these are the tip of the iceberg of our exploration of surreal imagery…

… expect more (:

Underwater Fantasy

A girl finds herself underwater… ‘Is this a dream?’ she wonders…

… if it is, it’s very real…

… and she has no problem breathing water…

… and it’s really beautiful here…

… dream, another reality, whatever… it seems to be her current reality…

… things could be worse.

Forest Dweller

We think these are the best Elf images we have created so far! In the one above you can see how Mj randomly adds elements that are usually bizarre, but sometimes perfect, like this sweet Elf’s darker skin pigmentation, which we think is a really beautiful touch…

… we love everything about these images…

… we love the sharpness of the detail…

… the lushness of the plant colour…

… the falling rain/dew, which is another element Mj spontaneously added…

… and, of course, the absolutely gorgeous Elves (:

Framed Elf

Playing around with frames…

… we created this gorgeous Elf babe in Mj…

… and we tried making frames in Mj, but it just couldn’t grasp the concept of an ‘art nouveau frame’… it could do frames, but they were NOT art nouveau…

… we tried Night Cafe, but, although it did a much better job, they were too much like a Disney version of an art nouveau frame…

… but Dream Machine produced lots of really nice, very art nouveau, frames. So here we have the perfect working combo of three (counting glorious Photoshop CS5.1) different programs. We really adore this sweet elf, everything about her. We’re not sure the whole ‘framed’ thing looks any good, but it’s an idea we’ve wanted to explore for a while, so this is a start (:

Warrior Nun

It took us days of playing around, blending and blending, trying to get this result… finally we thought of using the best image we’d managed to create, and using it in a prompt line (with the words ‘warrior nun’), using the ‘imagine’ function, which we’ve hardly used for months, now…

… wish we’d thought of it earlier! These magnificent creatures are exactly what we’d been trying to create…

… we imagined warrior nuns to be strapping, raw-boned amazons, tougher than most men, a bit like Brienne of Tarth, but without the education…

… they would have been simple farm girls, primed by the church to do the brutal work of their unforgiving god…

… and here they are, in all their driven splendour…

… glorious, fearless angels of death.

The Queen

Born the legitimate heir to her warrior father’s throne, the only girl, with five younger brothers, she has had to fight her entire, young life, just to survive to inherit that throne…

… from an infant, she has had to learn to know when she is being manipulated, who she can trust, where she can and can’t walk alone…

… she has lead warriors into bloody battle and survived, she has even had to fight some of her own brothers to the death, and seen the surprise in their arrogant, entitled eyes as they died…

… still young, she is now the Queen. Long may she reign.

J G Ballard’s Ghost

We’ve recently been posting images we made several days ago, in the order that we’ve been making them (we are about 5 days ahead of what we are currently posting), but we liked these images so much (we made them this morning) we’ve decided they can jump the cue. While we were making them we decided they were the illustrations for an imaginary J G Ballard story we started developing in our head, in tandem with creating these…

… in this story several rich woman, gathered on a sprawling estate, and wanting for nothing, but never happy…

… decide to kill their fat-cat husbands, and live without men…

… we never know if this is a local event, or part of some world-wide societal collapse…

… but, in a very short time…

… these woman are eating their dead husbands, and worshipping the forest and the lakes. In a few years they will all be carrying home-made weapons, and dressed in animal skins, and hunting men…

… if you are familiar with J G Ballard, you’ll know that, although he didn’t write this story, he used most of these elements in various stories he did write. There is often a lot of water in Ballards stories, and societal decadence/collapse.

Gothic Romp

This series is several steps removed from ‘Blue Gossamer’, but clearly utilises the filmy, translucent drapings…

… we love the wonderful elements…

… the stunning, flame-haired young woman, her Victorian heart just bursting with unrequited passions she barely comprehends…

… romping heedlessly through a moonlit, foggy old boneyard, hoping desperately for some kind of fulfilment… but doomed to marry Cecil, a very successful accountant friend of her papa’s.

Gossamer Green

These are the more or less direct transmission of theme from our last images…

… we’ve still kept the gorgeous, stylised, Art Nouveau poster look…

… while bringing the theme firmly away from the last vestiges of Boschian weirdness…

… and into lovely Nouveau sweetness…

… while also managing to keep the luscious palette from the Boschian fantasy, but adding the wonderful, green gossamer gowns (: