The Drowned City

I put a new exhibition up at Placebo Gallery, today. It’s called ‘The Drowned City’…

… I have finally embraced the AI-generated art craze! I only started playing with it today! In several hours, I generated enough work for this exhibition. I did these using the prompts ‘the drowned city’, and ‘climate crisis’, amongst others…

… I thoroughly enjoyed myself! These are pretty basic, and just my first attempts. I touched most of them up in Photoshop, though nothing really dramatic…

… I’ll probably move on to generated images that I can use to compile my own scenes, rather than just giving the AI a scene to generate…

… but these aren’t as easy to create as you may think! You need to constantly tinker with the ‘prompts’, and it’s surprising what a difference in quality a differently phrased prompt can create…

… I’m really impressed with what I was able to do in just a few hours of play, and look forward to where this leads me (:

Fields of Lavender

My gossamer-winged darling and I visited ‘Lavender Bay‘, today…

… if you know us, you’ll know we were instantly smitten with the sky, here…

… there are lots of fields of flowers, here, not just lavender…

… where, if you have hands, you can gently trail them through the beautiful buds…

… all against a backdrop of ocean and pink clouds…

… a lovely, soothing environment…

… while I was taking this picture, an avi complemented me on my butterfly… first time that has ever happened… Flutter and I were both delighted (:

Big Sky

Flutter and I recently visited ‘Big Sky Over Florence‘…

… this is a ring of little islands around what must be where an ancient volcano once was…

… as the name suggests, the sky is a gorgeous, dominant feature, here…

… everywhere you look, there are picturesque buildings, campsites, and cutesy pose places, but my little, fluttery friend and I prefer the rugged places and the wide, uncluttered horizon.

This Mortal Coil

Flutter and I visited This Mortal Coil, today…

… there is a very strong Maxfield Parish/neo-classical feel to this beautiful build…

… the place is a dreamscape…

… filled with gorgeous flowers…

… and ivory towers. Flutter could have been killed, by this one, if her systems hadn’t been hardened against EMP strikes by, um, me, in the future… her very words were ‘EEEP! If future you hadn’t hardened my shell against EMP strikes, that would have killed me!’… needless to say, I was very relieved future me had taken such a precaution with our little, fluttery girl…

… after the maudlin gloom of Transylvania, the light and colour, here, were very welcome…

… and we adored the neo-classical romanticism of the place (:

Transylvania Again

It’s been a year since my first visit to Transylvania and, once again, they have thrown the sim open to non-Vampire/Lycan folks, this time on their 18th birthday…

… I didn’t have my little Flutterbye for companionship, last time… she happily circumnavigated my person, and kept up her usual, sweet patter of gorgeous observations, my world being, still, totally new to her…

… we found whole area’s I’d not seen, last time. As well as very Victorian-era area’s, there are also area’s with a rural, post Victorian, early 1900’s, American feel…

… if F. Scott Fitzgerald had written a Vampire novel, some of it, surely, would have been set here…

… of course, you can’t have Vampires and Lycans without at least one castle…

… this is an extremely high-level sim, as far as it’s uniform depiction of a style/era goes. It is very well constructed, and well worth a look. There is nothing scary, here, except the lag, which is the stuff of nightmares, and prevented me really enjoying my time here… I had to come back three times, over about 8 hours, each time slogging it out for about an hour, waiting for things to rez, then battling the crippling lag that would eventually force me to give up, because it’s hard to take pictures when you can barely move…

… but I didn’t regret it, getting to see and photograph new aspects of the place and, like Brigadoon, there is only a short window of time, each year (not every 100, thankfully) when us non-Vampire/Lycan’s can visit…

… and, I’ll have to come back, tomorrow, because I didn’t get a chance to visit the very good art galleries I remember from my last visit.

The Forgotten Revisited

I went back to The Forgotten, today…

… I wanted to show it to Flutter, who hadn’t arrived from the future, the last time I was here…

… but I also felt I hadn’t seen everything, last time…

… and I totally had not! There is so much to see, here…

… so many dark, hidden places…

… but, what I missed last time…

… is that there is cuteness here, too!…

… it’s not all darkness and decay…

… there’s all kinds of pretty little things… there’s even a shop, here! I’m pretty sure I still haven’t seen everything, but there’s always the next visit (:

Space Girls on Mars

After their asteroid stopover, the girls decided to explore Mars…

… their sleek new craft had no trouble getting them down to the surface…

… Mars is currently ruled by corporate oligarchies…

… whose hulking factories are terraforming the red planet. It’s surface is still lethal to humans, but now supports many forms of engineered flora and fauna…

… the humans live in massive, self-contained city-buildings…

… the Space Girls decide to explore one of them…

… the change of lighting is quite dramatic, everything is bathed in predominantly blue neon…

… though this lower, domicile level is pretty sleazy. The girls decide to spend the night in the comfort and safety of their heavily armoured vehicle.

Space Girls

Two girls have stopped on a shelf on an asteroid to enjoy the view…

… one is a cybernetic butterfly from the future who doesn’t need oxygen to function, and the other is a 4,000 year old being from the edge of the universe who metabolises her oxygen needs via a wormhole-like link to her mother, who is actually a sentient planet, so neither girl is bothered by the vacuum of space…

… they are out sightseeing in their new ride…

… although they are telepathically linked, the humanoid one sometimes verbalises what she says to her little companion, whose answers are only heard by her…

… ‘Well, this is pretty, isn’t it, sweetheart?’ she says.

Digital Collage

I am showing some new work at Placebo Gallery, the show is called ‘Digital Collage’, which is what this new work is…

… these are my interpretation of ‘collage’. Like traditional collage, all the materials are ‘found’ images, not my own photography, nor that of my human…

… apart from a small amount of blending, I’ve deliberately kept the technique to that of ‘cut and paste’, though, these being done in gorgeous Photoshop, I’d be silly not to use the ‘blend’ ability occasionally, which is why these are ‘digital’ collages, because aspects of them would be impossible with cut/torn and pasted paper…

… the images range from quite dark to quite light-hearted…

…the light-hearted ones were fun…

… which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy doing the darker ones, either (: