For a week that's been so quiet, it's also been "eventful" -- if that's a word you'd choose for "social media hijinks." This was the week when my Facebook account was cloned, and people I've known for years have received anything up to FIVE friend requests from me. Naturally, they've been reporting the nonsense left and right, and what does FB do? Assigns an AI to check whatever criteria it uses to make up its dense cybernetic mind, and then calmly tells me, via email, that the cloned about is me. That, in fact, it's me out there, pestering my friends and then complaining about myself to admin, with requests to have myself deleted. Oh ... suuuuure. Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Meh.

So the week turned into a puddle of anxiety which in no way endears me to the whole rat circus of social media. I'm a hair away from dropping the whole thing and walking away. I have a bunch of blogs (which precious few people look at), but Facebook isn't doing much for me lately: it's more of an aggravation than a pleasure. Harrumph.

Anyway -- I did get some painting done. The big project was The Dragon and His Boy, in comic art style. Plus a nice landscape or two, plus a portrait of an elven warrior woman, which derives from AI but was massively painted. Hey, I do that much painting on an image, I sign it. I wouldn't sign something that was right of the AI engine, but the one I use mostly -- Playground -- doesn't often produce images that are good enough to fly solo without a lot of painting. So I get lots of images, but the AI hands me a whale of a lot of work...

Mind you, there's a new AI just debuting at the moment: Imagine.art ... and this one has potential. It's producing images that are not too bad at all, without any work from the prompter. Now, these, below, I would not sign off on, because all I did was dodge and burn, balance, resize and crop...

... those were just too easy to generate. They're simply not my work. So... 

I might look at using Imagine in the future, when/if I have a cash flow. I do need to generate AI elements to be recomposited into complex paintings, and Imagine is certainly doing a decent job of providing them. Right now, 80% of the icons on the site flash up a "coming soon" message when clicked, so ... not yet. I'm not laying down cash before they have it fully functional!

That's all from me, for this post. More soon.

Hey -- Collateral Damage has been podcast! (And I'm thrilled)

News! ANALOG Science Fiction has podcast my story in the May/June issue -- Collateral Damage. The podcast is online right now, and you can find it here ... happy listening! 

https://www.podomatic.com/.../2023-05-17T08_52_30-07_00  

(This artwork here is not from the magazine. I've put this together myself, as a "flag-waver," or an "attention grabber," but this is the character from Collateral Damage, as she appears in one of the other stories, Welcome to Mars, which you can find elsewhere. It's an Iray render from late '21, and it fits the story to a T!) 

Space Pirate! Also a fantasy city, and landscapes...

Playing with comic art again today ... also a bit of "fine art" in Photoshop, and a bundle of landscapes. I would love to tell you I rendered the landscapes in Terragen, but it would be a barefaced lie, and you know me better than that! The truth is, Terragen is dandy, till you want to put plants, flowers and trees into the frame, and at that point it rockets out of reach: too expensive. No can do. Truth: it would have been a stretch for me when I still had a cashflow, but right now -- I haven't seen money in a loooong time, and am not likely to see it for many years to come. So when I do landscapes, it'll be photography, AI, or nada. These are AI. But they have that Terragen look about them, no? I like the comic art, to a point ... I prefer the "concept art" style, if I tell the truth, and of course, if you can achieve something like an Iray render, great. I'm not finding a way to do that at the moment, but I keep trying. 

Note to self: start up Studio, dangitall, and git rendering! 

Yes, but not today. Pain levels are too high today. Whose big idea was it to go hiking on Monday, and go so far, and climb such hills, that my left hip is still shrieking, even while I sit down?! Nobody to blame but myself ... which doesn't make it hurt one bit less, lol.   

The Mighty Fred ... and Autumn comes to Fangorn

 

Argh. What a day. Nothing went according to plan, and so much went wrong ... I just want it to be over. I managed about one tenth of what I'd intended to do, and even that was a change of plans from the day I'd wanted. Still, we'll end the day with a car that actually works, and the cloned, fake facebook account removed, not having bought into a telephone scam, having read the riot act to a stalker on social media, and with a pot of chilli on the stove for dinner. Aside from being deeply out of pocket to fix the car (ouch), the rest of it is under control. It's just been way more aggravation than I can take and come up smiling.

So ... another take on the fantasy hero, with a Lexica disaster rescued, repaired, repainted. What a mess this one was! Lexica buried the costume inside the character's body, muddled the leather and the metal ... took ages and a lot of work to fix it, so I'm abso-ruddy-lutely signing this one.

On the other hand, I won't sign the "Autumn in Fangorn" images, because I didn't do much of anything at all to these. Dodged and burned them to get the most out of them, otherwise the prompt seemed to work very well indeed. I've been having some good results with landscapes in the last week ... I'll share some more soon.

For now, all I want is coffee and make today go away. So ... signing out. 

Fantasy hero, Terragen type landscape -- and the cat!

 

The cat is a Maine Coon called Tyson ... he was out for his walkies with his mom, on a long lead and riding in a stroller until he felt like hopping out and investigating a shrub or the water's edge, at Laratinga a few weeks ago. I asked the lady if I could take a few photos, and as soon as she said yes, naturally Tyson wouldn't look up, or look at me. I grabbed the best I could get! Here, he's painted from the photo, down to the edge of his white ruff, or mane ... below that, I haven't much clue what he looked like, because he was in the stroller -- so I just blur out to impressionist strokes at that point. Am quite pleased with this one -- probably the best from-scratch painting I've managed yet. Most of it was done in Photoshop, because for some reason Krita didn't want to play nice at all...

The fantasy warrior began life as another disastrous Lexica picture which had to be rescued and re-re-repainted. I asked for a fantasy warrior; I specified "no helmet, no armour, no weapons, no shirt." Well, it managed the no helmet part, but it loaded him up with ironmongery ... and apparently, if you specify "no shirt" in Lexica, it's a cardinal offence which will get your account suspended. So, heaven help you if you're trying to render Conan the Barbarian, or a prize fighter or professional wrestler in the ring. Okay: message received and understood, and -- fair enough. I guess they've levelled the playing field, because if you could specify "no shirt," they'd have to do some extra work and specify that they didn't want topless females. Because you know what they'd get. Insert eyeroll emoji. To compensate for getting the helmet part right, Lexica saw fit to give this guy eighteen fingers. Eight fingers and a thumb on each hand,. His hand looks like a packet of sausages in the supermarket cold cabinet. Insert a second eyeroll emoji. So -- it's good thing I like painting, and can paint, or this is another one which would have gone right into the bin. Argh. Thank gawdz I haven't paid money for this ai. If I had, I'd be pretty disappointed -- because it's not cheap. I looked.

Anyway, this is where I am at the moment: painting happily, messing about with images and trying to stay off social media as much as possible. It dawned on me the other day how much of my time facebook is eating up, and for no useful purpose. In fact, it's too easy to blunder into mindless debate with strangers on facebook; and when they lose the debate, they slingshot right into abuse. It happened. It was somewhere between the pits and a laughable scene best forgotten. Having said that, there's better ways to spend your days; life's too short, and all that. So -- less time on facebook, for me, and more time enjoying life. 

A barbarian, and more ... painting happily

 

As always, not much to say ... just images to share. Trying out new styles of art, flexing the  artistic muscles, seeing what can be done, and how. These are painted half in Photoshop, half in Krita ... the girl and cat is a a fixed-up version of an AI disaster ... I'm really only signing it because I worked long and hard to save it. The mushroom on the forest floor is from a photograph, again ... the barbarian is a first attempt at comic style art. I like it -- I must explore this at some length! 

Next projects ... a cat, for sure; maybe some dragons; perhaps a study of a couple of cute Tawny Frogmouths, if I can work out how to paint feathers, lol. I've "finished" the painting once ... nope. I didn't get feathers, I got fur! I need to go back and have a look at how artists like Natalie Jane Parker, or at least Jody Bergsma, paint feathers, and do it again. I have several rainy days coming up, in which I have nothing much to do but paint, and knit, and do Qigong, so fingers crossed that I can get this worked out!

Sooo, how much is AI, and how much is painting? Okay. I'll show you the kind of "visual noise," the mutated rubbish, AI is likely to hand me. This is what I'm getting ... sure, some people know how to get great images, but I don't seem to be able to make it work, LOL. Overall, I get trash like this -- I posted it at full size; you'll have to view it full size to see what's going on: visual noise. 

So you go and go and go, with AI, and you manage to salvage an element from this, an element from that, and stash them, to be used as part of a painting. In all honesty, 3D is soooo much easier! If I had a tonne of money, I'd just buy a wagonload of props and git renderin'! AI is starting to annoy me ... a lot. I've been mucking about with this for two months or so, and its entertainment value has pretty much palled for me, because (and I'm the first to confess this!) I can't make it work. Now and then I get a good image accidentally; 97% of the time, it's just what you see here: unpredictable, uncontrollable, surrealistic, often nightmarish or monstrous mutation. It's actually pretty disappointing, so you might not hear much more from me about AI art, unless something happens and I miraculously start to get pleasing results. Results that are worth the subscription fees these guys are charging. I'm still using the free sample services, and I'm not exactly inspired to pay bucks for this!

Signing off now, and call it a day. Goodnight to all...

Tarzan in Caprona ... or Fangorn Forest, if you prefer!

 

Have I mentioned that I love my Huion pen tablet? Well, let me mention it again. I looooove my Huion pen tablet! Now, this is the kind of work I've wanted to do got a long, long time, and here we are! The first thing I painted was the background, a few days ago --

Fangorn Forest, as painted mostly in Krita, and a little bit in Photoshop. I was looking at this and thinking, "That reminds me of the Mario Larnaga concept art for the original King Kong" (the one that's coming up to its 90th birthday), which in turn made me think of the art that was done for the Tarzan comics and films, waaaay back when, and this popped into my mind. Noice!

In fact, it's so pretty, I did several different crops:

...that's the full screen version of the art, which I would call "Tarzan's Dark Domain." And in turn, this version made me think how this could make a great wallpaper! So -- here you go, guys, help yourselves and enjoy: this one is 1600x900, which suits my own monitor, and if it doesn't suit yours, I'm sure you have some kind of imaging program that will change the size to something that does. Feel free.

Wallpaper version -- 1600x900 ... help yourself!

While we're in fantasy land ...

I won't lie: this is 75% Lexica, and 25% me (whereas the Tarzan is 100% me, wholly digitally painted, right down to the last blade of grass in the background. I'm still mucking about with AI, but I'll be candid: it's highly frustrating, on so many levels. If I get into that here, I'll be grumbling in an hour's time, and it has as much to do with sexual politics as with the vagaries of AI technology, or even the highly dubious copyright status of pictures generated by a machine. So --

Dangitall, let's just paint:

...and here we are, right back in a world of digital doodling. That's all from me for now. Time to go and organise some dinner. 

Tarzan at the Core of Mars ... or guy candy, at least

 

Tarzan at the Core of Mars ... now I'm just being silly

repaint and matte of the Forest Goddess art from last week

Not much to write today ... just the images I've been working on since last I posted, and on a personal note -- I have flu. How it is possible to have flu when you're still wearing your covid mask because you're scared tod death of getting the plague, I do not know; but yes, I have flu. So... when in pain, distract the brain. Argh.

You could be almost forgiven for thinking the he-man image is an Iray render, but it's not. I managed to get Stable Diffusion to give me something halfway reasonable, and painted from there. In fact it was a bit of a mess ... notice, I've deliberately obscured the hands. They were hideous. I've also painted the costume,  and various bits of his physique that were bizarre, but at least I got halfway there before painting. AI art is way more difficult and stubborn that 3D rendering; it's just cheaper. I haven't paid anything yet, whereas, to do these as renders (which could be done), I'd have dropped a couple of hundred bucks. Sorry, my cash flow has stopped since retirement, and I can't go there any longer. 

But I've halfway got AI working well enough to get the elements from which to paint, and this was the original object, what I had in mind when I set out to do this. Not to just dish up images given to me by some machine, but to generate elements, and paint. So --

If you're trying this yourself, you might like to know what the prompt was, that got me the barbarian, close enough to fix him with a load of painting. Okay, try this:

fantasy man, young man, muscular, handsome, long black hair, studio photograph, high resolution, photorealism, Boris and Julie Bell, head to waist photograph,

negative prompt: beard, moustache, beard shadow stubble. too many muscles, eyes too big, cartoon, comic style 

I'm not going to promise that will work for you, because every time you come to the dang machine, you get different results. But today ... it worked. What goes wrong, predictably, ad nauseam, with this kind of creative process? Well... hands with six fingers, faces with the mismatched eyes from two different people pasted together, arms with two elbows, human figures with three legs and horses with five legs. For whatever reason, I don't seem to be able to stop if happening. Almost as if ... getting a good image happens accidentally. 

Anyway, I shall persevere, since I can't afford 3D props and costumes! At least I'm creating images, but I'd hoped for a replacement for 3D elements... Harrumph.

Now, I have flu -- I need tea, and pills. Here I go.