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?
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 recently started a series of images I am calling the ‘Golden Planet’ series. I have been posting them on my Flickr page. There has been ‘Golden Planet Princess’, and ‘Golden Planet Pilot’. Over the last few days, I created ‘Golden Planet Tourist’. I make these works using multiple images I create in wonderful Midjourney, then I take several of those images into gorgeous Photoshop, and stitch them together with a fair bit of masking, and some touchup painting and a bit of clone stamp magic. I’d almost finished ‘Tourist’, when I decided she’d look more ‘touristy’ with a Golden Planet souvenir brooch, so I went back to Midjourney and had a go at creating one, there, instead of in Photoshop. I was really surprised to get, from my first 4 variations, 3 perfect-looking ‘brooches’!… so I thought, ‘hey, why don’t I whip up some snake bites (lip piercings) for here, too?’… I’d gotten such a precise result for the brooch, I was feeling lucky, so, among a few other (sorry, my secret!’) words, I entered as prompts ‘snake bite, lip piercings’…
… imagine my astonishment when I got four images that looked like this! But astonishment quickly turned to delight! Though nothing like what I’d intended, I found these results incredibly beautiful, if not slightly creepy, but creepy gorgeous! I could never have deliberately made work like this, this was a serendipitous AI artistic bonanza. One of the reasons I enjoy Midjourney is that my work has always been iterative, and the Midjourney process is pretty much entirely iterative… I banged out dozens and dozens of variations on this gorgeous theme, occasionally tweaking the prompts, but not much. I now have several exhibitions worth of this work, which I will begin putting in my galleries, probably tomorrow (:
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