Another Realm

While Woodland Fae are hibernating, they are actually existing in another realm…

… this is the realm where they are one with everything that is the substance of their environment…

… they are part of the forest light, part of the woodland pool…

… they are home.

Transformations

We have been working the transformative concept of Faerie hibernation…

… the idea of little woodland Fae physically melding with their environment as they sleep away the Winter…

… while they exist in this state, the Fae themselves are in an alternate reality… they are living in their dreams…

… the forest they serve has reclaimed the magical stuff that their beautiful little bodies are made of…

… not only do they never age, in this state, they regenerate… when they awake in the Spring, they are actually brand new… ageless souls reborn into a perfect, rebuilt body.

Sleepy Fae

As Autumn fades into Winter, the woodland Fae find themselves a cosy burrow…

… they are giggling, joyous creatures of Spring and Summer, and prefer to sleep the Winter months away…

… woodland Fae are not just ‘from’ the woods, they are ‘of’ the woods…

… as they sleep, the boundary between them and nature dissolves…

… they become part of their winter nests…

… sweet, sleeping creatures of the deep woods, dreaming of Summer butterflies and warm breezes.

Return to MidJourney

We, the human and I, just couldn’t stay away from Midjourney…

… and are delighted to be creating beautiful images, once more…

… this series is of autumnal fae…

… sleepy, dreamy fae, snuggling down in their nests of twigs and feathers, already dreaming winters dreams…

… the centuries rush by…

… which is the dream…

… and which is real?

Little Grey Cutie

We thought we’d do a post about the only aspect of Mj we consider to be a negative… apart from it’s boring American puritanism, but we’ve said plenty about that…

… as we’ve said, our process has always been iterative, Mj has exponentially amplified that process…

… if we get Mj to produce something we really like, we always ‘reroll’ it, which means, basically, hitting repeat on the initial set of four… we have to do that with any image that depicts anything resembling breasts because if we took the above image and changed it’s prompts, Mj would shriek that it can’t use such an obscene image, and refuse to do anything with it, but it will happily ‘reroll’ that image in it’s first set of four iterations… it must not ‘look’ at them when they are in that first set… it wouldn’t even let us ‘zoom out’ on an image like this, because, once again, it claims we are using a pornographic image, and refuses…

… so, we wind up producing lots of images that are similar… in the case of our ‘Little Grey Cutie’, here, we saved 50 of them, these are the ‘best’ six, though saying that isn’t correct, because all 50 are the ‘best’ of the 100 or more we actually created, and all 50 are gorgeous…

… which brings us to that other, ‘negative’ aspect… the sheer amount of stunning images we are able to create! As we’ve also said, before, the human and I share an obsessive/addictive personality, if we can create too many excellent images… we do! Far too many to ever use, or do anything with! But we just can’t help ourselves…

… and, so, we wind up with a folder counting 50 of these gorgeous cuties, all of whom are only slightly different, and it’s almost impossible to pick six that are better, let alone one that is best!

Hunter-Killer

Unlike our previous, beautiful cyborgs, these beauties were never human…

… they are military-grade androids, deliberately made to look like beautiful young woman for the psychological edge it gives them when fighting humans…

… they are two meters tall, and weigh 500 kilograms, they are powered by a tiny fusion reactor that is buried deep in their heavily armoured and shielded chests. Most of their body is taken up with hydraulic and pneumatic strength multiplier systems… they are incredibly strong, they are capable of tearing the turret off a tank with their bare hands, if they can get a good enough grip, which they usually can…

… like a cheetah, they have a top running speed of 120kph, unlike a cheetah, they could maintain that speed for years, should they need to. Their minds run several times faster than a humans, so, to them, humans are very slow, even bullets are slow… couple that with the fact they can move several times faster than humans, and the equation becomes severely weighted in the favour of these gorgeous machines. They don’t carry weapons because, well, they are weapons. Their battlefield job is to seek out, and destroy, enemy infantry. Not only are they extremely well armoured, but they also generate an electro-magnetic field which is, in fact, a forcefield, which repels all small-arms fire… they can withstand almost any assault other than a direct hit from a tank shell, or a missile. One of them, on her own, is quite capable of eliminating an entire company of soldiers, especially as the soldiers become more terrified, and begin firing blindly, killing each other as they try to hit something that is running through them at speeds of 120kph, while it pulls them to pieces like toys…

… there are only a handful of these creatures, each one costing about as much as a nuclear submarine, but, hey, you don’t need more than a few.

We Can Rebuild You

So, after are brief sojourn into the surreal, as a palette cleanser, we returned, refreshed, and invigorated, to what you must surely, now, recognise as our most favourite theme…

… gorgeous post-human babes! Our little break paid off spectacularly, as we feel these are our best-yet series of cyber-babes…

… it took us countless hours to get Mj to create images like this! Apart from Mj’s puritanical refusals to create any image with more than the tiniest amount of what it sees as naked flesh, to deal with, there is also Mj’s propensity to produce pin-up-like woman in robot-like clothing, instead of images of females that actually are machine/half-machine….

… so we were delighted when we started getting images like these after hours/days of not-quite-what-we-asked-for results…

… once Mj gets on a roll, we just run with it, because we know, from experience, that Mj eventually, suddenly, will lose the plot/thread, and revert back to pin-ups wearing b-grade robot outfits…

… but, for now, Mj is making us very happy, producing these beautiful cyborg sweethearts (:

Strange Tales

With Mj, it’s never a big step from the Surreal, to the bizarre…

… I deliberately moved away from this sort of imagery after I’d gotten a better grasp of using Mj…

… but, it was fun to do some again…

… I certainly couldn’t do them this well, a year ago…

… these are very much images that evoke entire narratives…

… dark and strange narratives, for sure…

… haunting stories of experiments gone wrong, passions misplaced…

… strange tales, indeed.

Serendipitous Surreality

When we (the human and I, not Flutter… she’s not much help when it comes to critical culling of our work, because she totally loves everything I do, equally, which is lovely, but, as I say, not helpful (: ) get to a stage, with Mj, where we are either unable to continue an iterative thread, or it just stays the same, and stops evolving, we deliberately throw out random prompts that we think might dramatically change things up. We tried ‘surreal polaroid’, and got the above…

… from there, we were away, again!…

… Mj hadn’t given us the result we envisaged, but we were totally happy with the images we were getting…

… from there, it was just a matter of changing the prompts, but keeping ‘surreal’ in there, somewhere…

… although we even dropped that, sometimes, but substituted it for words describing non-standard reality…

… Mj does wonderful surrealism, I suspect because it actually has no idea what it’s doing, no idea what ‘reality’ even looks like, so it has zero problems creating strange reality…

… in fact, you have to keep it within your chosen parameters, otherwise it starts creating absolute visual garbage, insanely cluttered images that resemble little more than an explosion in a junk shop…

… but, if you can keep the weirdness under control, you get beautifully surreal imagery.

Dream Geisha

One of the phrases I tried as a prompt, when I was doing the ‘post-modern Ukiyo-e’, was ‘dream geisha’…

… and I started getting these beautiful images…

… though thematically similar to the ‘post-modern Ukiyo-e’, these images have quite a different style…

… and as I always do when a new thread develops in my iterations, I continued producing these images in parallel to the Ukyio-e images…

… if anything, I feel these beauties are even more gorgeous than the Ukyio-e babes…

… and while still post-modern, (how could AI-generated art be anything else?)they also have quite a lovely ‘traditional’ feel (: