Celebrating again. Whoot!

 

Art as a reward for work done, if you remember ... art, also as a celebration when something wonderful happens. Something just did -- in fact, I'm still grinning like an idiot, as I said to an acquaintance on FB.

We're almost up to the one-year mark after the diagnosis from hell, where I was told my husband of twenty-six years had two years to live if he was very lucky. (Yes, I melted down. Yes, 2025 has been the year from hell.) We have fought this thing very hard indeed, and --

-- after a year of unremitting effort, we've just been informed (by his official neurologists) that in the last three months there has been zero deterioration in his muscle strength, no weight loss, and no change in the "markers" that measure how the condition is supposed to progress from diagnosis to disaster. So ...

... safe to say that the condition has been completely arrested at this moment. Call it remission, if you like. Call it whatever you like, the bottom line is that if we can keep on doing what we're doing, and maintain this status quo, then we can sail on indefinitely until --

Well, you know what we're waiting for. The scientific breakthrough; the therapy that goes into human trials. And Dave is at the forefront of this -- already known locally as the "poster boy" for the fight against this condition -- so that he gets chosen for those human trials. And then the new therapy works. 

This is what we're hanging on for, and the truth is (fact!) we're doing it. We must be doing something right because, statistically, 70% of people with this diagnosis are gone in the twelve months after said diagnosis, and life expectancy is 6 - 36 months after the onset of symptoms. Well, Dave is waaay past the three year mark, and he's still eating, talking, walking, driving, riding his bike (pedal-assist ebike: takes a lot of effort; you do not just sit on it and open the throttle. It isn't like a motorbike), he's sleeping well, has a good appetite, he's not losing weight, and he's not losing strength. In fact, I see muscles reappearing in his arms. Oh yes, I'm happy. So --

This is the part where we celebrate, and where I use art to reward myself for work done. And make no mistake, the last year has been effing hard work for me. You have no idea. You don't want to know. And yes, yes, yes, this is AI art. Why? Because I'm too ruddy tired to paint or draw or muck about with DAZ and Bryce and Terragen. Too exhausted. The AI is there to help me. Every bit of imagination is still buzzing around in my mind, and you know full well that in a normal year I would be painting and staging these scenes. At the moment, no can do, and yet --

-- oh yes, the imagination is still in there, and still thriving. So I decided to just stop whining about AI and let the images come out the only way they're going to at this moment. Now, all; (repeat all) of these images have been Photoshopped to squeeze the most out of them after they were generated by Gemini, so there is a two-level creative process. To begin with, you put your vision into the simplest possible form for the AI, which has the intelligence of a toddler with TBI. Something like this:

A fantasy warrior (he can remind you a bit of Aragorn, or something similar), is sitting under an old oak tree, resting, and he is wearing leather and linen costume, and he has long dark hair, and he has a lovely orange and white tabby cat in his lap, and he is obviously really fond of the cat, and it is late afternoon, and the sunlight is golden, and there are sunrays in the background, and the viewer gets the impression of an ancient statue just in the background that is buried in the earth and covered in moss, and I would like the image to be in "landscape" format at 16:9 ratio, and it should look like a really high-quality photo from an expensive professional camera, and the camera is about ten feet from the warrior, and only about three feet above the ground

The AI will get close-ish -- close enough to give you something to work with, then --

...the comparatively flat image is passed right into Photoshop and it is painted and enhanced, and then painted and enhanced some more. So there is quite a bit of artistic creativity in there, not merely the original inspiration, the imagination, and the ability to convey this to the AI in a manner than will get it to come out and play. You can also crop deeply into a lot of these images:

In this one, I've cropped faaar inside the original image, because a Gemini image is BIG, and its level of detail can be astonishing:

So yes, sure: these are AI images. But at the moment, Gemini is saving my artistic spirit. Without it, I would be slogging through life without letting my imagination off the leash at all, which would just about destroy me. I've come to the conclusion that the many people who are raging against AI are screaming into a hurricane. They have a just cause, and I used to scream right alongside them, but look ... no way do I expect to ever earn money from art! It just is. Not. Going. To. Happen. I don't take money for art, so why shouldn't I use AI to keep my creative spirit alive until Dave and I reach the end of our path ... whatever that end is, and wherever the path has led us. Wish us well. It's his birthday tomorrow, too, and just reaching it is an absolute triumph, so I'm smiling -- and celebrating. Hence, art. 

 

As you like it...

Genesis 8, Iray

Michael 4, raytrace

Digital painting, Photoshop

One factor has characterised the last month or so here in South Australia: heat/drought. The rain stopped. The heat came. It's been ... interesting, to say the least. Not fun, but -- interesting. No, I haven't done very much art in that time. Most days, I couldn't even turn on the computer. The PC enjoys the hot weather about as much as I do. In other words, not at all.

But for what it's worth, we're close to the end of this nonsense now. It's been autumn, officially, for two weeks, and we've had some actual rain (enough to end the drought, though it didn't go on for more than a day). Temperatures will be down by ten and fifteen degrees Celsius in the days and weeks to come, and I'm looking forward very much to getting back down to some art. Also writing.

For now ... these are repaints of old renders, some of which never even saw the light of day. They were done as tests and experiments, and appear to have been shelved, several years ago. Digging back through the archives is like hunting for buried treasure -- and finding it. 

So, what's your fancy? Iray, raytrace, painting?? It's tremendously interesting to compare results across a couple of engines. For instance:

Amadeus: firelight ... raytrace; and

Amadeus, identical costume -- Lux Render

Amadeus; same costume but the textures
have been switched so shaders ... Iray is different

What makes me chuckle a little is that the textures on the costume in the raytrace and Lux renders -- well, the pants he's wearing appear to be made from the cushions on the couch we had about ten years ago, and his shirt, I kid you not, is the crochet handbag I used to carry around 2012! Ooooh, I used to enjoy making textures and the displacement maps and opacity maps and reflection maps ... why did I ever stop?! 

Must get back to this. Start up Studio, go right back to good old Michael 4, finish reinstalling all my oooold Renderosity content (I only got about a third of it reinstalled before Genesis lured me away and everything started going awry again) and just ... have fun.

Note to self: have fun this time!

More pretty things ... why is it always the day from hell?!

 

Why is it always the day from hell? Always! Things were fine till evening, and I thought, "Hey, we're going to get a good day." Then you hold your breath, because you're just "waiting for it to happen." And it did -- something always does; you can count on it. Argh.

So ... indulging myself in a little art, working on this blog some more, to take my mind off the sheer aggravation. Sigh. I wish I could tell you these are new renders, but they're not. I still don't have the time to invest in fresh art -- a quick sketch here and there is the best I can do lately, and to be honest, I'm too tired even for that, most of the time! These are old ones, but they've been touched up in subtle ways to make more, and better, of them. 

Still working on this blog! I though I had it in good shape, then I looked back at it, spot checking here and there. Nope. Lots of missing images, dead links, obsolete stuff ... lots more work to do, to get it right! Bear with me. I also haven't yet had the chance to finish my new gallery site. Life just keeps getting in the way. And there's soooo much to do in the next few days, it would be futile to say, "Tomorrow's another day, we'll start again," because that would be utterly impossible. 

We soldier on! 

This is starting to be fun again!

The truth is, you can forget how much FUN this used to be. Fourteen years ago, I was all about spinning stories and running reams of images to illustrate them -- like these pictures, from the little comedy, "Vampire Hunters in the 23rd Century." They were Horace and Hortense Hershey, under-dressed for a Halloween party when they got a message from their snitch, Willie the Weasel to tell them that the vampire they've been tracking for years will turn up at the old cathedral tonight. They divert from their party plans and wind up vampire hunting in silly costumes. 

It was huge fun. But in the endless quest for better and better renders ... renders that look like photos, or movie stills ... dang, you can lose sight of the FUN. You end up with one image that you slaved on all day, and no story. Eventually, the magic just goes away and in the end ... phhttt. If you're like me, when the magic goes away, you can't get into it anymore.

So ... in search of the old, old magic, I've been rummaging through the Ancient Archives, pulling some of these antediluvian images into Photoshop and giving them the treatment...

Now, nothing, repeat nothing, is going to take a Deep Shadow Map or the simplest possible raytrace you can get (because the PC will crash if you ask for anything more), and turn it into the kind of image you were seeing from me in 2019. But having said that --

-- dangitall, I had some great ideas in 2010 - 2012. All my best ideas date from this period. Not the best work. The best ideas.  My best CG work dates from 2019-2020. Yes, to some extent, Photoshop can make many of these pictures much more presentable for viewing today, but nothing replaces the know-how, the hardware and the software to simply ... make better pictures. 

Now, in 2010, this was the best I could do with the hardware at my disposal:

Fast forward thirty months, and this was doable:

Due to one thing and another (Real Life: my mother passed away after a loooong illness; I landed in the hospital for two surgeries; had a fall, spent some time in a wheelchair, then hopped on crutches for six months ...) I took a few years out of CG art, any kind of art. Then I came back, in 2019, and while we were still raytracing, those raytraces looked like this now:

But even so, the fun had fifty percent gone. I was imagining the stories that went with these images, but I never wrote them. Looking back into the Ancient Archives, I used to write stories all the time. Much later, I "went pro" -- I've been in ANALOG Science Fiction twice! But the old fun never came back as I hunted and hunted for that cutting-edge Iray render, all that photorealism. In the end ... I quit altogether, took another couple of years out, and came back as a digital painter! And don't get me wrong --

Digital painting is actually where my heart lies. This is me painting with my new Huion pen tablet, in 2023:

...but I'm remembering the sheer fun of spinning yarns and illustrating them with raytraces that are sooo quick to do, you can end up with four or five ina session. Heaven knows, you take something so old, it's been gathering dust for an eon, let Photoshop loose on it, and end up with this:

So ... my fingertips are actually starting to tingle to start up Studio and ... and ... and ...!

 

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.

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. 

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.

Willow Creek -- now, this was a challenge!

 

Stonemason's Willow Creek set is enormous ... so huge, it gave me a major challenge. The first time I rendered it, I saw something I haven't seen yet on this PC. The GPU "choked" before the render was complete. Say, what?! That shouldn't happen. So I took the scene apart and figured out what was eating up the GPU space ... swapped out the water shader and changed the lighting model. Phew! With that done the set renders in something like a quarter of an hour. So it was time to get creative! 

The boat was a prop from Cornucopia, back in the days when I dabbled fleetingly in Vue; new shaders and so forth -- it renders nicely in Iray. Our elven hero is CC Foster, slightly tweaked as an elf; and having designed the character specifically for this scene --

Now, that's nice. I like this character a lot. The planes and angles of his face suit the role so well ... must come back to him again soon!