Breathing new life into old goodies -- and a major question answered

Okay -- call this a success. Not all experiments work, but this one did. I wanted to know how the images behave if they're repainted and relit ... now, I knew it worked with raytraces (the Consulting Mage and the baby dragon called Trouble -- that's a raytrace), but how "fake" would the process look if you tried it on an Iray render? The horse, above, it the 3D/CG equivalent of what artists would call "mixed media." The props are so ancient, some of them are 2D! The backdrop is an actual painting. The horse was rendered in Iray ... the mane and tail were added in Photoshop, from CG's packs of add-ons for the Millennium Horse, from Rendo. It's a 2019 render, and very "storybook," and I was nowhere near to confident that repainting and/or relighting it wouldn't just make it a messy fake. Okay -- no problem. So I delved back into the archives for an "okay" Genesis Iray render -- Sinbad. It wasn't bad, but I always knew it could be so much better. Ha! Now it is, and yes, you can do this repainting, relighting on Irays, and they don't look fake. Neat! 

Photoshop magic enchants some beloved old raytraces. Check this out!

Work continues apace on the this blog, which has needed a facelift for a very, very long time. I'm also tackling the challenge of The Lost Songs, which has been in limbo for about as long as the conclusion o the Game of Thrones book series! And if I do say so myself, I've got a raft of better reasons for letting the story slide into limbo than George R.R. Martin has! Read the backstory behind what happened to The Lost Songs, and why -- and what's coming next for this project -- right here. 

And to prove it, let me show you these:

Leon Greatsword: 2023 repaint...

Leon and Iphigenia: the 2023 re

These are the 2023/24 repaints of the old images from 2012. Wow. What a difference. This is purely Photoshop magic; nothing has been re-rendered, but everything can be repainted -- and, of course, the illustrations for the remainder of this story will come into the world looking like this. In fact, it's worth taking a look at the old and the new, side by side. The one that needed the least work was the Lux Render; the old raytraces, however, dated from a time when I could barely turn on shadows without making the computer crash! Ah, those were the days...

So ... bear with me while I get this project into shape, and then ... let's have this finished, as outlined in the post I referred you back to above!

In other news ... work continues on the photo blog, travel blog and so forth. And also on the art galley site. I'll reiterate: if there is anything on the old site you want to keep, grab it now, because when it's gone, it's gone. 

New art, new projects ... fantasy, dragons, guy-candy, websites...

I know I keep saying, "Well, I'm back, to quote Sam," and then vanishing again. Life is like that. You name it, it's happened in the last few months -- doesn't mean I haven't been painting, rendering, doing all kinds of work --

So, what have I been up to in the last couple of months? It's been busy, and a lot of art has been produced, but it's mostly been more commercial in nature ... less experimentation...

...in fact, I would dearly love to get back into CG work. DAZ, Iray, Terragen, Bryce, whatever. I can't believe it's been close to two years since I regularly did that stuff!

What slows me down (read: brings me to a complete, dead stop) is the price of new props. Those 3D toys that put the zest into the work. They've become waaaay more expensive at the same time as the cost of living has blown out to kingdom come, and my income stream(s) have dwindled away. So, for me it's digital painting, plus the fun of using AI to generate elements for re-re-re-composition. In terms of creativity, I've been "all over the shop," up to and including children's illustration...

...but one of the things I've enjoyed most is going back into older work and matting it, reworking it, turning something old into something new:

...but the major job I've completed recently is a website for the Sherlock Holmes novelist, Dr. Mike Adamson. This was a challenge, because to complete it, I had to illustrate it -- that was part of the deal, and it meant creating over 100 pieces of fresh art in just a few days. Impossible? Mmm, it would have been, in the days before you can source the elements from AI before the work/fun of painting and compositing begins. Suffice to say ... I managed it. Here's a few of my favourite plates, in their original form, prior to painting:

Well, the website was done on time, and ... wow. Not only was it a fabulous experience producing this, but the finished result made me soooo envious, I had to tackle one of my own! Mine, of course, is based more around art and photography than writing, so it's fraught with practical issues that Dr Mike's more text-driven site was not. 

Here is the first site, all done:

...and here's a sneak preview of mine, which is still under construction...

And mine is going to take some seriously hard work to complete, because it'll have something like 500 images, all of which need to be "called" from thumbnails, lest the pages be a 70MB download each. Even given today's speeds, this is impractical. Even a slightly sluggish connection would make for a horrible download experience. But -- when the site is done and uploaded, it will replace the old galley. So, if there is anything you want to grab off that ancient gallery, get it while you can, because when it's gone, it's gone. 

Now, on top of all that ... pile on a nasty case of Covid. I'm currently coughing up both lungs and seriously considering lying down at two in the afternoon. In fact, I believe I will --!

 

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.

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!

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...

Illustration experiments: Consulting Mage at Home, and the Queen of Summer

 

Today's experiments are about illustration. Only the Queen of Summer is new; the other two -- Consulting Mage, "Abelard at Home, with dragonling and cats" -- were done about eighteen months ago, and yet again, I discover I never posted these. What a brain. Insert eyeroll emoji.

Am starting to feel my way back into art, and enjoying both Krita and Photoshop a great deal -- more than I used to. In fact, it's about time I bought myself some extra brushes for Krita. I've been wandering around at DeviantArt, and seeing what other artists are doing. Even when they're working in Krita, which many are, they're using brushes I don't have: watercolour, oil colour, that kind of thing. I feel like I'm ready to take this to the next level, so ... next step: brushes. 

Not much to add for today. The trip I mentioned, to the Limestone Coast, is cancelled for the fourth consecutive time in as many years! Twice, it was covid lockdowns, a third time it was flooding in the area which closed the roads ... this time? Well, it's difficult trying to do a van-camping road trip when your van is the workshop! Yep. Mechanical issues. So we're at home for the whole vacation -- day trips only. That's okay, although I could sigh a bit, if I let myself. We haven't been away for longer than day in a year and a half. Argh.

So ... next, Krita brushes, plus raytracing in Studio 4.whatever, to achieve the flat canvases for painting over. You want those hunky heroes, that guy candy? I think it's about to happen!

So much art, so many pictures, so little time for posting anything these days! This has been a time of computer issues, software issues, frustration, exasperation ... what can you say? You do what you can, and "solider on," as always. Alas, something has to go on the back burner, and these days, what I usually have to let go is blogging, which seems a bridge too far in this day and age of Facebook. Someone said to me the other day, "Nobody blogs anymore." I don't think that's true; but 99% of everything now seems to be Instagram and Facebook...

So we'll play catch-up a little here, and post a motley assortment of images from the last month or so. There's no theme, no "thyme or reason" to this; and they certainly aren't included here in order of rendering! Just images, for the pleasure of images. I'm actually thinking of slithering sideways into Instagram. I've joined three or four art groups on FB; it's interesting to show you work where people can comment on it, like it -- or utterly ignore it. I've been wondering for a long time if people are much more about instant ratification -- "shut up and show me the pictures." Blogs aren't well set up for that; they're about ... blogging. Writing and reading. But Facebook and Instagram are ideal platforms for "shut up and show me the pictures."  Hmmm.

I'll stop here, and post again in a few days, play catch-up some more, with another assortment of images. I'll try not to let the grass grow ...! But honestly, this last month has been such a catalog of dismay as first the new computer went haywire, and then the software! I opened a customer support ticket at DAZ, but to date nothing has come of it -- and they're overdue now. Till next time then ...