Something that AI art programmes do really well, usually by accident, is the strange and bizarre…
… we have been working away for a few weeks, now, to create beautiful, surreal images…
… they often have VR goggles on the figures, because that’s how Mj interprets most requests that mention ‘alternative reality’, but we don’t mind that, as what we are illustrating here is, in fact, the concept of ‘what is reality?’…
… so we love the idea of our beautiful girls actually being in strange realities at the same time as they are viewing other realities via technology… or is the act of that viewing what is putting them there, in the first place?…
… these are the tip of the iceberg of our exploration of surreal imagery…
The lone survivor of a downed space-freighter finds herself struggling to shore on an alien planet…
… eventually her feet touch firm ground…
… and she stumbles onto the land…
… she hopes rescue arrives before her air-supply runs out.
We had fun illustrating this little scenario… we couldn’t quite get her face consistent, and couldn’t get her spacesuit consistent at all, other than it being orange… but the stunning sky and the sea are wonderfully consistent (:
We think these are the best Elf images we have created so far! In the one above you can see how Mj randomly adds elements that are usually bizarre, but sometimes perfect, like this sweet Elf’s darker skin pigmentation, which we think is a really beautiful touch…
… we love everything about these images…
… we love the sharpness of the detail…
… the lushness of the plant colour…
… the falling rain/dew, which is another element Mj spontaneously added…
… and, of course, the absolutely gorgeous Elves (:
… and we tried making frames in Mj, but it just couldn’t grasp the concept of an ‘art nouveau frame’… it could do frames, but they were NOT art nouveau…
… we tried Night Cafe, but, although it did a much better job, they were too much like a Disney version of an art nouveau frame…
… but Dream Machine produced lots of really nice, very art nouveau, frames. So here we have the perfect working combo of three (counting glorious Photoshop CS5.1) different programs. We really adore this sweet elf, everything about her. We’re not sure the whole ‘framed’ thing looks any good, but it’s an idea we’ve wanted to explore for a while, so this is a start (:
It took us days of playing around, blending and blending, trying to get this result… finally we thought of using the best image we’d managed to create, and using it in a prompt line (with the words ‘warrior nun’), using the ‘imagine’ function, which we’ve hardly used for months, now…
… wish we’d thought of it earlier! These magnificent creatures are exactly what we’d been trying to create…
… we imagined warrior nuns to be strapping, raw-boned amazons, tougher than most men, a bit like Brienne of Tarth, but without the education…
… they would have been simple farm girls, primed by the church to do the brutal work of their unforgiving god…
… and here they are, in all their driven splendour…
… for an imaginary story called ‘The Perils of Eden’…
… about the dangers awaiting colonists…
… to a seemingly pristine planet they have, of course, named ‘Eden’…
… we love this stuff (:
Just to be safe, we googled our imaginary title… there IS a book called ‘Perils of Eden’ (it’s not scifi)… of course there is, such a great title… we feel that, for the purposes of our bit of fun, ‘The Perils of Eden’ is sufficiently different.
To our delighted astonishment, all the functions we’d given up on trying to make work on our damaged Mac suddenly started, with no further prompting from us, to work… the installers for Adobe Bridge and Discord, that we’d been futilely double clicking (and trying all the recommended workarounds to get to open) two days ago, suddenly opened…
… not only that, which gave us beautiful Bridge and full access to Midjourney, again, but Bluetooth suddenly started working properly, again, and, most wonderfully, our iMac could suddenly see external disks, again…
… we have zero idea why these things suddenly fixed themselves, and we don’t actually have much faith they will stay fixed, given the things that have happened with our beloved iMac, but we are delighted to be able to use Midjourney, again, and delighted to just be able to do our thing, again…
… we spent time, yesterday, going through all our recent work which we were lucky was still on TimeMachine, (we have another, even older iMac on which we do all our Photoshop work, since Adobe and Apple got together and tilted the playing field, making it impossible, on new computers since about 2020, to use any of the Adobe products anyone had legitimately payed big money for, you now have to pay Adobe vastly more money to use those products without ever owning a physical disk… our 15 year old iMac is running El Capitan, and has been disconnected from the net for the last 5 years) and realised how far behind we’d gotten in our posts, so we’d actually started getting a post ready…
… and here it is! Beautiful punkettes in a delightfully rough style we really like… it suits the subject matter perfectly…
… we particularly like this last one, we’d love to develop this style further… but, before we do that, we still have a heap of other stuff, all different styles, to post.
We are really happy to be doing our thing, again, and, with a shiny, totally up-to-the minute new iMac already payed for and soon-to-be-shipped to us, we are hoping this one will keep working for the two weeks that is supposed to take, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t, but we’ll also be philosophical about it (:
Born the legitimate heir to her warrior father’s throne, the only girl, with five younger brothers, she has had to fight her entire, young life, just to survive to inherit that throne…
… from an infant, she has had to learn to know when she is being manipulated, who she can trust, where she can and can’t walk alone…
… she has lead warriors into bloody battle and survived, she has even had to fight some of her own brothers to the death, and seen the surprise in their arrogant, entitled eyes as they died…
… still young, she is now the Queen. Long may she reign.
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