Tag: Portrait

Beautiful Creatures

I just adore the ability Midjourney gives me to literally mass-produce beautiful imagery…

… I don’t think a beginner could produce the consistent level of beauty that I am now producing because, believe me, Midjourney can produce some appalling garbage if you give it the wrong prompts, but I think that most beginners who are persistent, and perhaps as obsessive as I am, wouldn’t take too long to be doing what I am doing…

… I develop my themes, then I experiment with them. I’ve found Midjourney seems to remember my themes, and generally produces the type of imagery I’m going for, but I’ve also found that adding a single new prompt, or a new image for texture, in an attempt to fine-tune my results, can totally stuff up what I had going, and then it seems to lock onto the stuffed-up template, and I literally have to create new ones using the old template, so it can get it’s bearings again…

… on the other hand, Midjourney has often added amazing details I never asked it to add, which I’ve really loved, like with all these Celestial Fae; I’ve never once asked it to add wings!…

… and I loved the fact that it often put them on their heads, which led me to the explanation that Celestial Fae don’t really have ‘wings’, but cosmic energy that humans ‘see’ as wings. So, really, Midjourney prompted me with aspects of these images (:

Stardust

Celestial Fae are creatures of the cosmos…

… they are made of light and stardust, as are you, but in them it is a matter of degree…

… they have total control of their cosmic matter…

… they are beings of pure energy, which they can bend and mould to their own needs…

… they use energy to ‘fly’… they don’t really have ‘wings’, that’s just how they were perceived by primitive humans…

… humans ‘see’ that energy as ‘wings’…

… the Celestial Fae see it much as fish ‘see’ water, or humans ‘see’ air, which is to say, they don’t see it at all.

Aqua Dreams

I moved back, away from the more and more stylised visions of underwater girls I’ve done, recently…

… back to the way I was initially making them…

… a much more dream-like vision…

… more Ophelia-like…

… more mysterious…

… the more ‘Lowbrow’ style was fun to pursue…

… but this dark dream style is what I like most.

UnderWater Girls

I found myself creating more gorgeous underwater girls…

… I’m really pleased with the lowbrow look of these works…

… the beautiful weirdness…

… whereas my earlier underwater girls were dreamers in an aquatic dream…

… these girls aren’t dreaming…

… they are beautiful creatures, totally in their element.

Goddesses

My flaming beauties evolved into sun goddesses…

… magnificent creatures…

… who embody the power of the sun…

… not just in a literal sense…

… but in the actual sense…

… of being living vessels of flame, who cannot be consumed by flame. Understandably these beings are treated with considerable respect (:

Snake Bite

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 (:

Retrospective Installation

I decided to hang a retrospective installation, featuring some of my digital portrait paintings. Portraits have always been my favourite theme, both for painting, and photography. People who know me will know the work I’ve been showing the last year or so is quite different from what I used to do. I have two digital styles, one I call my ‘comic’ style… I’ve always been interested in sequential art, and, a lot of my early digital paintings, which I started doing around 2012, are in this style…

… they are potential panels for that stunning graphic novel I never did, because I simply could not satisfy my own inner critic about the quality of my work…

… my other style is my ‘photorealistic’ style, where I actually had to learn when to stop polishing, because the paintings end up being so like photographs, it kind of defeats the actual painting process… I still want people to go ‘oh, that’s a painting!’…

… my earlier stuff was pretty dark… dark, but gorgeous, and was always about very scary girls…

… by 2016, even my ‘comic’ work was looking pretty realistic. In 2015-2016, I did a lot of Suicide Girl fan art. My work was easily some of the best on their fan art page, but hardly anyone ‘liked’ them, because I painted portraits, not nudes…

… I also paint singers I adore, and babes from films. These images are just 8 of my paintings from 2013 to 2018. I’ve done a whole lot more. The choice, for these, was to start as early in my life as a digital painter as I could find, the rest was actually dictated by what was easiest to find on my chaotic, two terabyte hard drive (: