Fantasy, guy candy, fun in Photoshop, and a little fiction...

This batch was a real, genuine adventure. To begin with, the portrait of an elf ... Legolas, if you like ... was rescued from a pretty awful Lexica image: parts of a helmet growing out of his head??? Lines and wrinkles on a young, immortal elf??? A beard line, on an elf??!! Noooo way. So -- it looks like, if we want Legolas, we're going to paint! So be it.

The fantasy woman is an amalgam of five different haphazard attempts by Stable Diffusion to get into the ballpark. Armour segments floating in midair, armour pieces growing out of her skin, hands that looked like demented octopi with waving, backward-jointed extra fingers ... argh. Horrrrrible. So again we painted, and then painted some more more: the best face I could get, the best attempt at the costume, the best hair option ... slap it all together, fix the eyes (one iris waaay bigger then the other one, and the wrong shape, to boot!!), remove the crop lines, from where the machine took bits and pieces of various images and stuck them together not quite at random; paint for a couple of hours; put in a new background... end of the day, you bet I'm going to sign off in the image. I work four hours on something, I danged-well sign it. 

The faerie warrior and the fly agaric is an amalgam of a Genesis 8 render I did over a year ago, and a photograph I got with my phone last week. This one was a lot of fun, and also a major challenge, to get the colours and resolutions of the two images to agree. One is a render, the other a phone pic. Even at this late stage, I can honestly say I learned something new in Photoshop. Want the original phone pic, for comparison? Here you go: 

The last image is a painting from a photograph at Carrick Hill. There's this one doorway, or gateway...

 ...and how could you resist! It's just begging to become a painting, and a fantasy at that. Delicious. The trick was to get just the right image for the "beyond" part of this. If this is the doorway to adventure, then it had better be a landscape you can't say no to. So I wrote a little drabble to go with it: 

Edgar had heard many times about the gateway -- and according to the locals who lived around Eltenham Forest, several opened into the earth, or into faraway places. He'd always dreamed of finding one, and last summer holiday he spent most of the time investigating old trees and misty dells, with no luck at all. This year, when he'd given up and wasn't even looking anymore, here it was! Maybe the magic worked this way he thought as he ventured closer, and closer ... the harder you looked, the less you were likely to find yourself a gateway to adventure.

Very close now, he could smell the clean, sharp scents of mountain air and hear the calls of strange birds, unlike any that lived anywhere near Eltenham. A chill breeze wafted from the gate, and tendrils of mist crept cautiously through at his feet. Here at Cricklewood Hall, it was a hot afternoon full of droning beetles and the heavy scent of flowers, but far on the other side of that gate, dawn light cascaded down the east side of a range of dragon-fang mountains, and the smell of pine trees prickled his nose.

He was almost to the gate, dying to step through, when he saw the man on the other side -- and the man has seen him!

So there you have it ... this was my fantasy fix in the last couple of days! I might do SF next, or possibly glam, or perhaps SF glam. I'm sure that's a thing ... and if it isn't, it ought to be. 

Elven hunk or Marvel super-villain? Golly, let me think...

 

This one is a digital painting based on an AI image that was, frankly, alarming -- and there's a story behind this, so stay with me! I've been trying out an engine called Lexica, which is a lot easier to work with than the other three I've tried so far (Wombo, Dreamlike and Playground). Lexica will at least get into the ballpark, even if its people do tend to have fourteen fingers and three legs (rolls eye). But...

I gave it a pretty simple prompt. I asked it for an elf warrior maiden ... and I pretty much got what I asked for, right off the bat. Cool, right? What could possibly go wrong, then, if we decided we wanted Legolas as well? 

Change the prompt to say YOUNG MAN, and MALE, rather than maiden, and surely it ought to just click over into the masculine filters and give me the beautiful young male version??? Harrumph.

No, I haven't signed off on these: I haven't done anything to them, they're just as Lexica handed them to me. On the left, "elf warrior maiden." Okay: good one. On the right -- oh yeah, here we go. Change the parameter from female to male, and it changes from a beautiful young woman to a malevolent old coot with a scowl and a horned helmet! The tropes are alive and well at Lexica, I see. Soooo...

Yep, this was always going to be a painting, although it started with Lexica's closest attempt to Legolas: he still looks like a Marvel Super Villain crossed with Grand Moff Tarkin, with bits of a helmet growing right out of his skull!!!??? But it gave me a place to start painting --

So, three hours of painting later ... Legolas. Gone are the vacuum-sucked Moff Tarkin cheekbones and the scowl, the scarred cheek, and the trenches of lines and wrinkles in his face, and the dumb hairline, and the even dumber helmet horns that somehow sprouted right out of his cranium. Gone is the long, thin face that looks like a 1930s movie villain ... Fu Manchu, anyone? Grrrr. Three hours of painting. You bet your life I'm going to sign this one.

Anyway ... I wanted Legolas, I got Legolas, and AI gave me a good place to start, but ... I give up. I've been looking at the most amazing things that people can get these AI engines to do, but after six weeks I still can't make it work for love or money, LOL. So tomorrow, I'm going back into Krita. If we're going to paint, let's paint and enjoy it, right? Right.

The Festival of Fire - story illustrations

 

Just finished the suite of illustrations to accompany a story ... nice! The Festival of Fire is a "deep outline" of a fantasy tale ... dragons and cats, a magical city, a many-layered backstory ... at around two thousand words. And I might work this up full-length; it speaks to me. 

The art started life as AI rubbish. And I do mean rubbish. Cats with three tails, one growing out of his chest? Dragons with wings sprouting from their heads? Three-legged humans?! Rooftops floating in mid-air??? Lanterns not attached to anything, floating around by themselves?!! Cars buried in the road surface?!! 

Suffice to say, I took each AI generated disaster to pieces and put it back together. That's over ten hours of painting, so -- you bet your dang boots I'm signing off on these images! They're mine now, no matter where they started life. 

If you like fabulous cats and dragons, and fancy a short read about a boy called Tomas and a felix called Tyree, I've posted it to my writing blog ...thanks for looking!

Guy candy, science fiction and a landscape ... loving my Huion pen tablet!

 

In the style of Boris ... and it worked!

Illustration for an SF tale: link below

There's little to say in this post! The guy candy ... well, I don't know his name, but he's a male model from the US, and I believe he's Cherokee. I saw a very small, very poor reproduction of a photo -- it had been mangled by whoever put it together, almost overwhelming the model. So I stripped it back to the original photo and turned him into a pure digital painting. Whoever he is, the need to be painted is shouting out of the photo. I wanted something in the style of Boris, and if you see this piece at full size, I think I succeeded here. 

The SF piece was done as a an illustration to accompany a "super-drabble." Too long to be called a drabble proper, because at 165 words it's 65 words too wordacious to be a drabble, but it's also waaaay too short to call it flash. Dunno what to call it, but ... if I said I could tell you a coherent SF story in 165 words, over 30 extremely short lines -- as illustrated by this painting -- and give you a chuckle at the same time, would you read it? Why not? If you would, give this a click, and enjoy. 

The landscape ... latest in an ongoing series of paintings in which I guess I'm teaching myself how to do this. So much to learn! But it's the biggest fun I know at the moment. Gives me a reason to get creative after the housework is done, rather than just picking up my knitting and nodding off to sleep! Am I getting old at last?!

A story in images... I like it! In fact, let me spin a tale to tie these paintings together!

 

We must begun with a depiction of the peaceful, beautiful life we are willing to do battle and possibly die to protect: gentle snow falls; early blossom shows a brave face to the end of winter, and a sense of almost spiritual tranquillity separates our village from the adjacent city. Here, home, heritage means as much to us as advancement...

The hero who has worked lifelong for the skills to protect this wonderful place -- the fifteenth generation of his family to undertake this commission; his grandfathers were samurai, many hundreds of years ago, and even when he walks the streets of the nearby city, his heart remains in the village that is his heritage, his one great love --

And here is the villain, the rogue son of the village who fled to the city after some heinous crime and never returned -- for he knows that judgment will be harsh ... and the city promises untold riches for one with this man's complete lack of scruple. Now, he's been hired to tear down everything we hold dear, and he arrives back with skills and powers few could hope to match --

He comes to the village, bringing his city ways, city violence, leaving a track of destruction and grief which is the bait in his trap, guaranteed to bring the hero home to face him in a terrible confrontation, on streets as old as time, where peace and halcyon spirituality dwelt only a day before...

The fight is terrible -- swords, guns, energy weapons, in the end, even magic which will take a toll even of the victor, while the loser in this battle plunges into the abyss, from which no power can bring him back. That battle will be fought from the village into the city, and before it's done, all is a chaos of fire and smoke, in which not only the villain but also the one who hired him are destroyed ...

Winter comes even to Lothlorien...

 

All digital painting today. Yes, I'm intending (every day!) to start up Studio and get rendering, and every single day I run out of time. There's always some danged thing that comes along to take up an extra hour or so, and push the art project into tomorrow. (What was it today? I managed to smash a full bottle of pure, organic coconut oil all over the kitchen floor. Glass and oil everywhere. Ooooh, boy.) So -- again, the 3D work will get pushed off to another time. 

So here's something a but like a young Aragorn, in the days when he was roaming the land as Strider ... and "Galadriel in Winter." Or, "Winter comes even to Lothlorien." 

There's not much to add ... life is being a Queen Bitch at the moment, but so many people are saying the same thing, I shan't complain. Well, I could, but nobody would be listening --!

So let me sign off here with something that's close to the AI original ... painted somewhat, so it's worth signing off on it, but -- did I create this from scratch? No. I just painted and tweaked the heck out of it. Enough to warrant a signature? Maybe. But I'll be honest, I'm not totally happy putting a signature on something that came out of a machine. I just made the case to a person on an AI group I post to, that I sign off on my stuff so that people know where it came from. Reasonable? I think so...

Pin-up time: a little guy candy for Easter ... any why not?

 

Going back through posts for the last few years, I'm discovering that loads (and I mean loads!) of pictures were never posted here. Time to catch up with that! And then there's new stuff, which is starting to pile up too, while I try to make the time to keep up with this blog. (I also run a writing blog, which is being horrifically neglected ... I've been selling fiction professionally for the last few years; I don't know if I ever mentioned that. 2022 did such a number on me, I'm hopelessly out of date with everything.)

So let me post some pretty things and say "Happy Easter!" 

The dragon is a full-on, 100% digital painting: "Dragon's Dominion." The other pieces are 3D renders which have been re-re-re-repainted, and I have to say, good old Michael 4 never looked so good. He renders well in Iray, and he paints up well in Photoshop. Okay, so he's never going to be as photographically realistic as a Genesis figure, but here's the thing: if you're not looking for photographic results, and are content (nay, happy?) with art, Michael 4 is dead easy to work with. M4 and V4 render very fast, and by the time they're painted and turned into art, I don't see an issue with the fact the work began life as something not-Genesis.

Translation: I'm getting the itch to start up Studio again, and if I can't render the brand new stuff, which won't squeeze into my GPU, then so be it!

Last thing for today: it's AI. I don't know what the heck it it, but I like it a lot. Using Stable Diffusion, I put in the incredibly vague prompt "The Meaning of Life." Gawds alone know what the machine is thinking, but for that prompt, this is what it gave me:

To me, it looks like some kind of alien creature, and it's strangely compelling. Oddly enough, I like it a lot. And on the completely other end of the scale, I painted an Easter card this morning. Let me post it here, wish everyone all the best for the long weekend, and get myself off to bed! Goodnight to all...

Something old, something new...

Some is 3D, some is AI, and a lot is painting ... once again, I'll leave it for you to decide which is which! Not much is going on right now ... I haven't had a lot of time to paint, but it would also be true to say that I've done three major editing jobs in the last ten days or so ... which is how one's time flies away.

Lots of painting projects waiting for me ... ideas are hammering at my imagination, desperate to get out. The hardest thing is finding the time for everything. I'll make the time. 

The most interesting piece here, today, is the spin on Leonardo's "Lady With an Ermine," which began life in AI, and had to be massively painted to make anything of it, or rescue it, to the point where it was 70% painting, in which case, yes, I'll sign off on it. (The machine have me some weird, weird stuff ... and as for the creature being an ermine?? It looks like a cross between a small dog and a large rat! Whatever. The machine doesn't know what an ermine is -- or a ferret, a stoat, a weasel ... so, to experiment, I asked it for a kangaroo. Yep, a kangaroo. It gave me a donkey's face (!!!) on which it had overlaid bright red clown makeup!! I was speechless. Also ... disgusted. 

Back to Krita, and painting, I think. 

And on that note, let me sign out for today...!

Happy afternoon's painting -- and here's a face you might recognize...

 

posted at full size -- enjoy

Edit: I wasn't happy with the face on this one, so I 
went back into it and ran another experiment:
face replacement. Hey, it worked!

It's been a day for experiments ... and most of them worked! Here's a face that might be familiar ... in fact, it's an old character I created a lot of years ago, but this painting is brand new: painted from scratch, from an old raytrace, with a new sky which began as a photograph I took about six weeks ago. It's painted in four layers, and ... it worked! The "blue goddess" is another kind of experiment, and that worked too.  Starting to feel like I'm making some genuine progress here, and these paintings can afford to start getting more complex. It was really gratifying to begin with work that began in DAZ Studio 3 about ten years ago, and end up with a full on painting. Nice! Guy candy. Call it what you will. 

Meanwhile, I'm trying to fathom how to paint feathers. I keep getting fur, not feathers, lol. Working on a painting of a couple of cute Tawny Frogmouths, and the plumage ... well, birds that look like owls don't have fur, but these do. Back to the drawing board and start again, I think!