Progress report of sorts... digital painting progresses nicely: suffice to say, I'm learning a lot. It's fantastic that this version of Krita passes files cleanly back and forth between its own file format and Photoshop -- means I can paint in both, at whim.
And the experiment to see if we can use AI to generate picture elements for recompositing works, at least up to a point. The SF piece, here is a digital painting till you get to the robot. Duh. The robot was generated as an element by "Dream by Wombo," which is Ma Google's freebie engine. I was able to get a usable robot to use as a picture element, and didn't have to pay forty bucks for a prop! Because, with the best will in the world, I own two robot props, and you've seen them so often, in so many settings and combinations ... meh. So ... okay. AI has its uses in the short term; namely, to save me beaucoup bucks when I need to get an image without a prop. Argh.
Knowing that I need to do this, I am therefore looking at just about every option out there, before I tell my hubby which one I'd like the year's subscription to, for my birthday. So far, I've looked at Lexica, Wombo, Dreamlike Art, and Playground ... Lexica is the best; Wombo is terrifically hit and miss, but it beats the others hands down. Dreamlike should be called Nightmarelike, because it distorts everything and everybody into grotesqueness. I asked it for "a beautiful young Irish girl with long red hair," and it gave me a picture that looked like a still from a horror movie --
Nope. Let's go back to painting! So I, uh, did. These are a blend of Krita and Photoshop, with bits and bobs generated by some computer to save me bucks.
We're about to pack up for a few days' trip to the Limestone Coast, and when I get back ... I'm going to start up DAZ again, for the first time in over a year. What's more, I'm going back to raytracing for a while, to get canvases on which to paint. Let's see what we can do here!
