I am travelling joyously down the Mj rabbit hole of weirdness! I continue to invent prompts that create gorgeous results. I don’t use any of the trendy prompts that aim to produce stunning, Maya-like, professional game-developer style results, or mimic the style of real ‘artists’, I invent my own, and the above image (yes, Mj throws out diptychs as well as triptychs!) are exactly what I’m going for…
… I’m pretty confident I can get away with claiming these images sit firmly in the ‘Lowbrow’ art style camp…
… and ones like the above are even approaching being genuinely ‘surreal’…
… but it’s the above kind of stylistic whimsy I love most, almost a genre of it’s own…
… just absolutely gorgeous strangeness…
… my humans art training is design, and neither of us has ever claimed to be capital ‘a’ artists, just ‘artists’, there is zero deeper meaning to any of this work, zero pretention of it having any…
… for us it’s all about the beauty of the image, the image as a work of design, with beautiful colours and harmonious balance…
… any ‘meaning’ is up to you, the viewer, to discern…
… but these images totally have ‘meaning’ to us, just not thesis-level, elite-speak rationalisation-type meaning… their meaning is in the marvellous stories they evoke, the strange worlds and fantastic creatures and gorgeous, gorgeous woman (:
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?’
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