I don’t have any idea where I am, or when, any more…
… I never notice the transitions, but I continue to inhabit long-dead spaces, and cannot remember the last time I saw another being…
… I appear to have been blown far off-course…
… by the winds of time that you disturbed when you left.
I became aware that there were no longer any other people in the realities I was now moving through…
… and these places I now inhabited, they weren’t even places we used to exist in…
… they were just sad, empty spaces…
… I was, somehow, trapped in the slipstream of your leaving, being dragged ever deeper into a reality of loss and decay.
As I wandered through those broken, empty places, I realised I couldn’t even remember your face…
… you told me that would happen, that once you’d made it to the next level, all trace of you would vanish from this one…
… but I could still remember the space that you used to fill…
… I realised I’d been roaming these places for years, possibly decades…
… even though I didn’t go with you, and could barely remember you, the fact I remembered you at all stopped me from fitting into this plane…
… I’d become a ghost.
After things fell apart, I looked for you in all those places we used to go…
… you weren’t there, of course…
… you’d gone to the next level…
… with all those elites you thought were your friends…
… I hope they were.
Take me to the water…
… it calls me in my sleep…
… it’s ancient voice is soothing…
… am I awake, or dreaming?
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…
… they add to the ‘dream’ aspect.
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…
… count on seeing more (:
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