Our exploration into the strange and surreal imagery Mj can produce continues…
… we love this stuff!… each image is a strange story…
… or could easily illustrate a strange story…
… while many are wonderfully strange, many are also just surreal…
… we love the dream-like cohesion of the disparate elements in these ones…
… and the timelessness of the weirdness (:
In some Elven clans, it is a tradition to give a new-born princess a baby dragon…
… new-born Elven princesses and baby dragons are both vanishingly-rare, so this is a seriously-taken tradition. The princess’s parents have to give consent and, of course, the mother of the baby dragon must give hers, as well… but it is also a huge honour for everyone involved…
… because both these fabulous creatures live for thousands of years, they develop an unbreakable bond. Their bond becomes so strong that even the death of one of them cannot keep them from the side of the other, they are bonded for eternity…
… dragons are extremely dense creatures, they weigh much more than they should, it’s one of their many strengths. After a hundred years, her baby dragon, even though dragons grow very slowly, becomes too heavy for the young Elf to cuddle in her arms, even though, as a young Elf, her arms are very strong…
… this doesn’t stop her snuggling up to him or her at every opportunity…
… one of the many aspects of this bond that the princess’s parents have to consider, before giving consent, is that the bond becomes so strong, the dragon becomes the most important creature in the princess’s life… she will never love anyone, or anything, as much as she loves her dragon.
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…
… expect more (:
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 (:
A girl finds herself underwater… ‘Is this a dream?’ she wonders…
… if it is, it’s very real…
… and she has no problem breathing water…
… and it’s really beautiful here…
… dream, another reality, whatever… it seems to be her current reality…
… things could be worse.
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 (:
Playing around with frames…
… we created this gorgeous Elf babe in Mj…
… 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…
… glorious, fearless angels of death.
A bit of design fun…
… creating imaginary 1970’s scifi book covers…
… 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.
Even little aliens get the blues sometimes…
… they mope around in shallow lakes of water-like stuff, beneath flat, yellow skies…
… wondering why the universe is so cruel…
… and what it all means…
… then they start noticing how beautiful this particular part of the lake is…
… and they start to feel better…
… and realise that everything is balanced by everything else, you just need to understand the points of balance.
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