The whole time I’ve been creating sci-fi babes in Mj, I’ve been trying to create cybergothic sci-fi babes as I see them in my mind. My vision of what cybergoth looks like comes from having been (not so much, now that he’s lost his edge) a huge fan of Alastair Reynolds, a few decades ago, when he, as far as I’m concerned, invented the concept…
… Reynolds’s often dreadlocked characters were grim, hard spacers, usually hundreds of years old, most of their organic bit’s swapped out for cybernetic enhancements. Even naked, they were usually stronger than the average planet-bound person, due to mechanically augmented musculature and superior artificial lungs, that kind of thing…
… but once they suited up, these people were like armoured vehicles, their suits bristling with weapons and strength amplification systems…
… everyone was unsmiling and serious in Reynolds’s stories, almost everyone died horribly, no matter how much you’d grown to like them… I’ve been trying to recreate their look for the last year. For some bizarre reason, right up until recently, when you told Mj you wanted ‘cybergoth’, it thought you meant you wanted someone whose face was covered with stupid, pointless crap that totally ruined otherwise gorgeous results… it seems to have largely stopped doing that, which is wonderful, but it also seems to have gotten a better handle on space armour…
… I’m really pleased with these cybergoth babes. Creating them was a whole lot of fun, and these five are just the tip of the iceberg, I created hundreds, trying to refine the results. Mj loses the plot quite quickly if you change your prompts just that little bit too much… I have loads of images, now, of what I would call ‘cybersamurai’, because I tried developing an image that had a helmet that looked like samurai armour, and because the word ‘armour’ was one of the prompts, Mj lurched off into creating futuristic samurai armour, which is cool, but not what I was going for.
I also created a very doll-like, armoured girl, which lead me to explore an entirely new theme, which I have called ‘Battle Dolls’, I’ll post some of them, next, they are super-gorgeous (:
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?’
She has been alive for millennia, everyone she ever knew, or loved, has been dust for centuries. She once lived in castles, dressed in the finest silks… now she has no home, other than the night. She must keep moving, there is no safety for her anywhere. She is unbroken, she will endure.
I read the sad news, the other day, that some dusty old luddites in the US Copyright Office have decided that no-one can copyright AI-generated art because, in their ludicrous, totally uninformed opinions, the creation of such work does not contain ‘sufficient human control’…
… to create these four works, I produced over one hundred iterations, constantly refining them via changed prompts, getting them to where they were what I’d initially visualised…
… then I took them into Photoshop CS5.1, and made many small, but vital, adjustments…
… sure, people can hit ‘play’ and produce instant ‘art’ using Midjourney, and those people can’t really claim to have had much input ( though they have had the same amount of ‘input’ as someone hitting the button on a camera), but for some crusty fools to claim I haven’t had ‘sufficient human control’ of what I create using Mj is the decision of idiots.
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…
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