Not really sure why I love doing these underwater babes so much…
… I’ve always adored Pre-Raphaelite art…
… and their adoration of the Ophelia story produced many gorgeous paintings…
… the romanticism of watery death, plus, just the power of watery places, the beauty that accompanies the deadly potential of slow, deep rivers…
… has held me in thrall since childhood, since long before I discovered Ophelia art…
… one of my favourite sci-fi authors from decades ago is J G Ballard…
… he, too, among other themes, was fascinated by water, and even wrote a story about someone just laying at the bottom of their swimming pool, long after they should have drowned, just breathing the calmness of the water…
… that’s what these images are about…
… not drowning, but arriving, whether as a dreamer, or somehow miraculously, in this safe, underwater reality, where you feel, finally, safe.
So, after looking at this image a bit longer, once I’d posted it, I decided that, no, the Mj anatomical weirdness I’d left in didn’t make it ‘dream-like’… in fact, it made it nightmarish…
… so I spent a few more minutes, 15 at most, and fixed it, kinda embarrassed by my initial laziness.
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…
I’m really loving the more ‘painterly’ results I’m getting…
… by including my own textures with the prompts I add to images I create in Mj (Midjourney)…
… these results are much looser than the ones I was going for, and largely achieving, with my ‘Machine Dolls’, and I’ve actually embraced Mj’s penchant for putting stuff all over faces, rather than trying to fight it…
… which is making everything more ‘organic’ looking, I guess. Anyway, I like the results.
I have made a technique breakthrough that I think is a game-changer for my Mj (Midjourney) work…
… I decided to see what would happen if I paired portraits I’d created in Mj with my own textures (I’ve been making my own textures in Photoshop for over a decade)…
… these are the results! Gorgeous, painterly images…
… I’m really, really excited with this development. When you add a texture image to, in my case, a portrait image…
… Mj doesn’t just put it in the background, it puts it everywhere, in these cases, due to the textures I’ve used, it has created brush-like strokes…
… I asked it for ‘soft side lighting’, and gave it my textures to work with, and it has done a stunning job of softening everything, and producing gorgeous lighting…
… it also started creating these beautiful, pixie-like faces, somehow based on the textures, because none of my original portraits looked this adorable…
… but I’m simply blown away by these wonderful, dreamy, moody images… I make a point of never asking Mj to mimic anyone else’s style, I don’t even stipulate things like ‘painterly’, I just beaver away trying to create my own style… this is really close to what that style has always looked like in my mind…
As promised, this is how the Machine Dolls evolved into synthetic organisms…
… though still the creations of dreaming AI’s, they began to look less and less ‘human’…
… less like ‘androids’…
… and more like synthetic organisms, synthetic organics… so, after I’d done my brief play with alien plants, I decided to revisit these synthetic organisms, and introduce the alien plant influence…
… this was the result… creatures that suddenly became organic-looking, as apposed to synthetic-organic…
As I’ve said, I am totally addicted to Mj (Midjourney), even if it does really irritate me with it’s idiot censorship of my work, and am, literally, producing at least dozens of images a day, often hundreds, so I’m actually far ahead, in evolution of work, of what I’m posting. In my last post I intimated I’d show you how organic-looking the Machine Dolls got, but before that, I want to show you what I’ve done in the last few days. I love the one above, you can see she comes from the Machine Doll lineage, but she’s actually human, not a synthetic creation. This one and the next three, I actually did a bit of work on in Photoshop to get rid of the junk Mj always puts on their faces, I then took them back to Mj, with their lovely, clear faces, and asked it to evolve them… Mj created results that had their faces covered in junk! Grrr! Anyway…
… so this one is only stylistically related to the previous one, but is a totally new direction, one that I really like, it has a kind of fresh simplicity, compared to all the elaborate/ornate Machine Dolls…
… this is the simplest one, but I still really like her. I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning her up, and could do a whole lot more work on her, but I kinda like the rough, sketchy look…
… I really like these new images, their rawness and simplicity. Getting Mj to evolve them like this will be quite annoying, as it continues to put rubbish on their faces. I wish it didn’t do that, it’s such a random, ugly thing… it produces these gorgeous images and totally ruins them by almost always putting crap on their faces… if you are lucky you can get it putting the crap on symmetrically, so it looks like jewellery, but, really, I’d rather it didn’t do it. The thing is, I’ve also managed to get very long runs where it didn’t do it, so, as I say, totally random.
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