Take me to the Water

Take me to the water…

… it calls me in my sleep…

… it’s ancient voice is soothing…

… am I awake, or dreaming?

Everything is Louder Underwater

Not really sure why I love doing these underwater babes so much…

… I’ve always adored Pre-Raphaelite art…

… and their adoration of the Ophelia story produced many gorgeous paintings…

… the romanticism of watery death, plus, just the power of watery places, the beauty that accompanies the deadly potential of slow, deep rivers…

… has held me in thrall since childhood, since long before I discovered Ophelia art…

… one of my favourite sci-fi authors from decades ago is J G Ballard…

… he, too, among other themes, was fascinated by water, and even wrote a story about someone just laying at the bottom of their swimming pool, long after they should have drowned, just breathing the calmness of the water…

… that’s what these images are about…

… not drowning, but arriving, whether as a dreamer, or somehow miraculously, in this safe, underwater reality, where you feel, finally, safe.

Edit

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.

Ophelia’s Recurring Dream

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.

Painterly Portraits

I’m really loving the more ‘painterly’ results I’m getting…

… by including my own textures with the prompts I add to images I create in Mj (Midjourney)…

… these results are much looser than the ones I was going for, and largely achieving, with my ‘Machine Dolls’, and I’ve actually embraced Mj’s penchant for putting stuff all over faces, rather than trying to fight it…

… which is making everything more ‘organic’ looking, I guess. Anyway, I like the results.

Very Recent Work

As I’ve said, I am totally addicted to Mj (Midjourney), even if it does really irritate me with it’s idiot censorship of my work, and am, literally, producing at least dozens of images a day, often hundreds, so I’m actually far ahead, in evolution of work, of what I’m posting. In my last post I intimated I’d show you how organic-looking the Machine Dolls got, but before that, I want to show you what I’ve done in the last few days. I love the one above, you can see she comes from the Machine Doll lineage, but she’s actually human, not a synthetic creation. This one and the next three, I actually did a bit of work on in Photoshop to get rid of the junk Mj always puts on their faces, I then took them back to Mj, with their lovely, clear faces, and asked it to evolve them… Mj created results that had their faces covered in junk! Grrr! Anyway…

… so this one is only stylistically related to the previous one, but is a totally new direction, one that I really like, it has a kind of fresh simplicity, compared to all the elaborate/ornate Machine Dolls…

… this is the simplest one, but I still really like her. I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning her up, and could do a whole lot more work on her, but I kinda like the rough, sketchy look…

… I really like these new images, their rawness and simplicity. Getting Mj to evolve them like this will be quite annoying, as it continues to put rubbish on their faces. I wish it didn’t do that, it’s such a random, ugly thing… it produces these gorgeous images and totally ruins them by almost always putting crap on their faces… if you are lucky you can get it putting the crap on symmetrically, so it looks like jewellery, but, really, I’d rather it didn’t do it. The thing is, I’ve also managed to get very long runs where it didn’t do it, so, as I say, totally random.

M-Dolls

As promised, here are some more of my gorgeous Machine Dolls…

… these are the images that Mj/Discord declared to be pornography…

… as you can see, the dolls gradually become less doll-like…

… and more machine-like…

… I had a whole story to go with the progression, but Mj/Discord have made that pointless by preventing me from developing the theme in anything other than a random, irritating way that isn’t how I work…

… I put up with their nonsense for as long as I did because I was still getting good results…

… but the way I was forced to work meant that, beyond a certain stage, I couldn’t further develop my dolls, because Mj/Discord wouldn’t let me take two of these images and combine them, which is how I evolve my iterations, combining the best results to keep getting better results…

… but Mj/Discord forced me to just keep ‘re-rolling’ these results, slightly changing the written prompts to try for evolution of style, but, really, just producing the same result, over and over again…

… which actually got pretty depressing. I managed to evolve them a bit more than this, and will show those images to you soon (:

Exquisite: Machine Dolls

The ‘Machine Dolls’ are very much like the ‘Baroque Nouveau’ cuties… very stylised/doll-like, which was exactly what I was going for, but these cuties are even more augmented than the ‘Cyber Nouveau’ girls…

… in fact these dolls aren’t even ‘human’ any more…

… they are beings created, by AI’s, in the image of ‘Humans’…

… they have gorgeous, synthetic faces…

… attached to glittering machine cores…

… and encased in precision-moulded alloys, energy fields, and spun diamond.

Exquisite: Cyber Nouveau

I’ve called these ones ‘Cyber Nouveau’…

… slightly more hard-edged/cyber…

… and just slightly less cutesy/stylised…

… than the ‘Baroque Nouveau’ cuties…

… but still, very much, showing the Nouveau influence…

… you’ll see that, as this ‘Exquisite’ theme develops, it is trending ever more toward my favourite style/subject matter, which is, of course… SiFi!

Exquisite: Baroque Nouveau

These ones are a lot more stylised, with a nouveau feel…

… I deliberately went for this doll-like perfection…

… but you can’t use the prompt ‘doll-like’ in Midjourney, because it instantly makes them into creepy, Victorian dolls, with huge eyes, and fat cheeks, like ‘Bride of Chucky’ dolls…