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.
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…
… the Stormy Knights.
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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