Art as a means of survival. Call it therapy.

 

Well ... if you've read my previous post, you'll know what my biiiig problem is at the moment. How many times are you told to prepare for imminent widowhood, and how are you supposed to deal with it?! Beats heck out of me. I don't have any more answers to this question now than I had in October last year, when the bombshell dropped on us from a great height. But life goes on, and even though I -- honestly, seriously, genuinely, unavoidably, do not have time to do artwork, the images and imagination are still bubbling away inside my brain. Now...

You know me. Normally, I don't actually approve of AI. I've always said that AI art is not real art -- and it isn't. That belief hasn't changed, and won't change. Art is where an artist sits down with tools and hours to spend on a unique project, and when they're done, they sign off on something that is a slice of their personality, a taste on their soul, a mirror reflecting their psyche. That's real art. AI is ... well, it's like this:

But although that, above, is neither artwork nor photography, it is vision, it is imagination, it is  creativity. And there are times -- as I am discovering right now -- when AI has its part to play. My mind is still filled with visions. My imagination is still running hot and fast. Mentally, I have never been more creative, but there is no time or energy, and there are no resources for me to "do art." But...

...if I don't find an outlet for all this imagination and creativity, I am probably going to go bonkers. Sure, a lot of you will line up to say I've been bonkers for years, and you're probably right. But this is quite a nice kind of bonkers; the kind that prompts beauty and serenity, and invites one's mind to spin stories off the top of images that popped out of the scenes I've glimpsed. Like:

That. There's a game I used to play years ago, when Mom was in her last months and I was, frankly, climbing the walls with grief and anxiety, not even admitting that I, myself, was seriously ill (and due to land in hospital for multiple surgeries only ten weeks after Mom passed, in 2017). I would slap together five or ten completely unrelated images and challenge myself, and other people who played the game with me, to conjure a story that wove together all the images. Mmmm...

It was fun, and it would give me just a few minutes' relief and release from the burden of reality. Now, I'm not going to tell you that Dave and I have reached that point yet. We're still fighting this thing. But we're also told that there is no way back from this beast that has sunk its claws into him, and all we can do is buy time, days, weeks, months that are to be cherished before it gets ... ugly. Well, we'll see about that. But the spectre is there in the back of your mind most of the time. Hmmm.

All of the above comes down to an inescapable bottom line. I need to find a way to "get out of myself" for long enough to hold onto my sanity. It cannot be art per se: as I said before, there is neither time nor energy for proper art. And as for writing -- same story. I'm an editor now. A good one. I enjoy it, and I do it well. But as for writing? No energy. You might not realise how much energy it takes to write coherent, luminous, emotionally rewarding fiction. Those days, if they ever return, and I hope they do, probably belong to a relatively distant future. But --

I can negotiate with an AI to winkle some of this creativity out of my beleaguered brain. And this is the part that AI has to play. Call it therapy, if you like. It relaxes me. It "takes me out of myself," and for just a short time I can forget, or almost forget, the beast that is lurking in the shadows. So...

...so let's visit alien worlds. Let's travel to other times and places. Let's forget who we are and what we must do just to get through one more day. Let's embrace AI for what it is: therapy. And no, I am not claiming that I painted any of these images! I didn't. You know me better. I hope, than to think I'd tell porkies of that magnitude! The most I did was put the images into Photoshop, adjust the colour balance, gamma, saturation, erase some "artefacts," and add lens flare.

I enjoy working on Photoshop -- always did -- and it's quick, once you know how to drive it properly. But 99.5% of this visual material, today, is right out of the AI, given some pretty smart prompts from yours truly, to get close (or close enough) to the images I'd imagined, to accept the result and smile. Like this:

Now, that's just neat, and it took about three minutes. The AI I'm using is mostly Imagen_4, which is accessed via Google's Gemini, plus, occasionally, Image-fx, also from Google. The images are better than those from Bing, and also Google doesn't "play silly buggers" with points that are traded for the privilege of making a picture -- points you have to buy or earn by patronising Microsoft in some way. Got no time, no money, and zero desire to faff about, guys. Google just gifts me the freedom to make pictures when I have some free time, and when inspiration is burning...

So let's hang onto sanity while Dave and I get through this, however we get through it. And in the meantime, let's go places and do things through the medium of images that I can create, via the alchemy of AI. I've embraced it. It has its place: it is serving me. It is going a long way toward saving me. I've changed my signature line to read "Jen's AI Imagination," which is utterly candid and honest. So let's see where Imagen_4 and Image-fx take us. (To reach Imagen_4 you just go to gemini.google.com and type in, "Create an image..." and then describe what you want. To use Image-fx, you would go to https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx, and follow the prompts. Gemini's Imagen_4 is so easily that a five year old could use it. The other is more ambitious. I leave it to you to choose your favourite.)

Story time: An Eagle's Flight

Yeeeees, there's a story burbling around in my feverish brain. I'm giving it the working title you see right here, An Eagle's Flight, but it could wind up called An Eagle Flies, or Where Eagles Fly, something along those lines. Don't hold me to the title you see here. But --

-- view this one full sized, and you'll see that this is the same character as the warrior on the cover. Call him Orel (at this point; the name might change later, along with the story title, though I doubt it for reasons that will shortly become clear). This is where the story begins: the reluctant hero, a man trying to outrun his own reputation ... thrice decorated by the Queen of Zarabia after extraordinary feats in battle. But those feats came at a dreadful price. Orel doesn't sleep, he dreams ... he feels possessed by the spirits of the warriors he's killed in the service of the Queen. She's old, and she dotes on him; she's like his grandmother, which is saying a lot. Orel is not native to this country. He's from the east, and arrived as an orphan boy just old enough to walk. He knew only his name. In the common tongue of  Vennia, Orel means eagle. Queen Isabeau gives him his ticket of leave from the regiment and a heavy purse, so  Orel can take his cats and his horses, take to the backroads in a Vardo like those belonging to his own people ... and find himself, get his heart and mind back into synch. But --

-- yep, it was always on the cards. He hasn't been on the road more than five or six months -- just long enough to watch springtime turn to autumn, and start to feel like a human being again (not because he's sleeping better or not dreaming, but because he and his ghosts have made their peace) -- when he runs into a couple of old comrades from the regiment. Gianna and Lynos have just left the service, and have taken soldiering work in the pay of a local thane, who advertised that he wanted border scouts. This was what they signed up for, but Count Radriq double-talked them with a binding contract ... they didn't read the fine print. Now, rather than just scouting up the source of trouble on the borderlands between Zarabia and neighbouring Kedd, Orel's old army mates are expected to root out the trouble. Since it's big trouble and they're massively outnumbered, they're up against a rather nasty wall. If they renege on the contract, they'll never get this work again, and it's all they're trained for. They're stuck, like flies in amber. So, when they meet Orel by chance, obviously they're recruiting. Or at the very least begging for help. The problem is this dude:

His name is Jevenni and he's baaaad. This Keddish warlord is building himself a rogue empire, and the bricks of its foundations are piracy, highway robbery, pillage, people-trafficking, whatever it takes. He has no scruples, and in this last twelve months has become the bane of the local thane's life. Count Radriq wants the Keddish land pirates gone, and he's holding Gianna and Lynos to the letter of a contract they signed too fast, in ignorance. Enter Orel. Help! So...

...they talk him into it, naturally enough. He's not the type to abandon friends in need. There's a couple of things he suggests: they must hire a good lawyer from Queen Isabeau's own staff, get him here, and have him reduce Count Radriq and his documentation to legal confetti. A lawyer from the capital will cost a great deal of money, but Gianna and Lynos know just where to get it. Jevenni has stolen wagonloads of valuables from the nobles of Count Radriq's fiefdom, and generous rewards have been posted. If they can recover even a tenth of what the warlord has taken, a lawyer from the city of Enashla will settle Radriq. Now...

 ...we launch into several episodic misadventures which are the meat-and-potatoes of true quest-fic, and it all leads eventually, inevitably, to this place: the land pirates' stronghold, in the ancient, ruined city of Ul-kedd-innu. To the horizon, the dead city lies smashed as a result of war, earthquake and plague more than a century in the past. Now, it is bleached bones and granite slabs. Jevenni has carved out his citadel in what used to be the palace and fortress, on the highest point, overlooking the fields of rubble-strewn desolation. According to everything his men divulge -- when captured and made drunk as lords -- he's so complacent, he doesn't post guards. In fact, it's a point of honour that he refuses to post guards: sentries and troops would only acknowledge that he is vulnerable in the heart of his own domain -- Jevenni would deny this to the death. With this information, Orel, the much-decorated veteran, favourite of the Her Serene Majesty, browbeats Count Radriq into providing a detachment from his household cavalry. But the force will hold back in the forest, waiting for a signal and letting the three specialists go in by stealth ... on the understanding that one man can pass where an army couldn't, and a specialist in creating havoc might bring the whole edifice tumbling down before the enemy knew it was happening. Under cover of darkness, in we go --

...long story short: subterfuge, stealth, swordfights and a liberal dash of strange sorcery, and by morning, the land pirates have scattered like roaches. Jevenni is extremely dead, and dawn finds Orel on the crenelated roof of the old fortress, right above the warlord's lair. Under the free, open sky, he is once again making peace with his ghosts and his father's old gods. The eagle -- for this is his name -- is trying very hard indeed to fly high and free, but will his flight carry him away from trouble, or right to the next battlefield? No one knows. Both Gianna and Lynos are injured, though not badly. They sent up the signal flare; the count's cavalry came in fast to scour the ruins for prisoners, and now Gianna and Lynos are only looking for the warlord's cache. They find it -- but in any case, they have actually fulfilled the contract. They no longer need a lawyer from Enashla. They take a portion of the spoils for themselves, as is only fair, and for himself, Orel takes enough to buy him the time, peace and quiet to begin again...

...and the story ends with a full-circle moment, right back where it began. At dawn, Orel hitches up his horses, stocks the Vardo, and is on the road again, headed away from anything remotely like a battlefield. In his ears, the ghosts' thin voices continue to whisper, but he has made his peace with some of them, and believes the others can be persuaded in time. The new sun is warm on his face, the open sky and moors lie ahead in the west, with snow-crowned mountains ringing a horizon so vast, it looks like the whole world. Now, perhaps the eagle can fly free after all. 

So ends this basic plot. In the writing, the details will change; names will change; a map will be sorted out, and the episodic parts will be tied down into a tight-knit structure. But this is more than enough to get my muse quite excited, and I think I'll enjoy writing this one. The art is not new. These are all 2019-2021 renders, featuring G8 Dae as Orel, G8 Rex as Lynos ... and I can't remember the G8 Female character who appears as Gianna, but she's in the DAZ library somewhere. That's the good old Millennium Horse, plus the DAZ Cat, many, many foliage and furniture props, and the old Gypsy Wagon from Renderosity. Everything here was rendered in Iray; a couple were painted comprehensively in Photoshop afterward. I was messing about with images and ended up, by chance, with these open in Irfanvew, in sequence ... the story just popped out at me! 

Just a few pretty things to close out the official Day From Hell

 

Nothing much to talk about today. Am working to hard ... the whole body is telling me it's time to stop and rest, and I'll get the chance in a few days' time. Not yet. I have a dep longing to paint, but it's not going to happen any time soon! Well, not before Thursday, at least. These images haven't seen light of day in years, and they've just been spruced up, polished, given a new spin. The end result is about 50/50, rendering and painting. I think, maybe, there's actually a story hiding away in these images. Hmmm ... let me think ... 

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! 

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 --!

A new barbarian, a dragon, the black horse, and more

A new barbarian ... the skinmap is Kingston (though not the face or body morphs -- those, I designed myself), and though I'd had high hopes for this skinmap, I'm not thrilled with it. It took a lot of post work in Photoshop to fix it -- and sure, you can do this, but surely you shouldn't have to, when you've paid quite a high price for the materials? What was the problem? Well, this:

You can clearly see the seam, where the torso mapping adjoins with the limb mapping. I suspect something is way off in the specular values, and yes, next time I fancy having a struggle with a skinmap, I'll delve into the numbers and see if I can straighten it out. But wouldn't it have been nice to just render this up and have it turn out properly. Hey, ho. Next --

If I were to caption this, I'd call it, "Starting to think this wasn't such a good idea!" Or perhaps the caption should just be, "Ruuuuun!!!" Ha! This one is for fun, whereas the other day I was in a mood to do a picture purely for beauty:

That golden portrait of a black horse came out of an experiment in turning surfaces into light sources, in Iray. It's actually easy, and so effective. And the practical outcome of that was, "I wonder how far I can go in lighting a whole scene only with surfaces???" So --

In this on, the fire is the main light source. I almost, almost got there, lighting the whole thing just with the flames. Not quite. I had to turn on a 0.2% environment light to back it up, and in the end I stopped waffling around and put a soft point light on his face, just to brighten it up a bit. But these are small things by comparison with the light being emitted by that surface. (The flames are an object, obviously.) With the barbarian standing back far enough out of the light, you didn't see how the skinmap doesn't quite work. I didn't have to do any post work on that one. And that's all from me, for today ... more soon!

A boy and his horse

This one is a combination of so many elements. The guy is Genesis 8, with a face and body form designed my me, and he's wearing the Dae skinmap, with the venous map turned on. So far, so good. Now, the horse ... I don't (yet) have the HiveWire horse, but the Millennium Horse is rendering up quite well, and it's also compatible enough with Studio 4 that you can pose it along with a Genesis 8 figure, and it looks okay, except for the mane and tail, which are (not to put too fine a point on it) crap. But wait, there's more -- 

Having rendered the horse with the mane and tail turned OFF, the next step is to paint the mane in. Now, I would love to tell you I hand painted this from scratch, but it's be a barefaced lie (and you know me better than that, LOL. No, no, this is the old CWRW Manes and Tails Pack Volume 1. which is 2D and manipulable in Photoshop, or Krita, or Affinity Photo (and since I can no longer use Photoshop, I did this pic in both Krita and Affinity, bouncing the image back and forth via the Windows clipboard, since neither program, on its own, has the functionality to do what I need. Ack).

The effect is quite nice, though nowhere near photographic. We'll shoot for photographic later, when/if we upgrade to the HiveWire Horse. For the moment, I'm happy to work with the old Manes and Tails packs by CWRW; if nothing else, they give be fantastic practice at using the new paint programs. I've already learned a lot. I was hunting around for the "skew" controls, and couldn't find them ... found out that this has been replaced by something immeasurably better: the Mesh Warp Tool. Woooow. Okay, so there's one big thing I've learned LOL ... and I'm happy enough using CWRW's packs of 2D add-ons, I might even treat myself to Manes and Tales 2 and 3, and perhaps even the poses and some new skinmaps for the old horse! If you're interested, they're at Renderosity; just get into the marketplace and search on "CWRW." The thing I like most about the Millennium Horse is, it still renders well in Iray, yet it's so low-poly, it renders fast. Meanwhile --

-- DAZ has upgraded to the Horse 2, which actually renders up much better than the MilHorse. But it's expensive ... As in, forty bucks for the figure, and not much in the way of skinmaps and morphs. If you want to morph this guy into a Frisian and Clydesdale, you have a problem. The starter bundle is a bit better, for $70 ... still few morphs or skinmaps, but you do get a swag of tack and add-ons. Hmm. I have to decide if I want to go with the DAZ product, or the HiveWire product ... and it's no easy decision to make! So...

The backgrounding for this piece is another 2D resource, one of the 2D/3D backgrounds which are produced by the raft by Sveva, and also available at Renderosity for around $10 per pack. So I took my cue from the 2D background, when I came to design the Iray lights for this one. (He's wearing the Landis Hair for G8.) And the last hurdle to be fallen over was finding a way to make Photoshop brushes work in Krita ... easy answer: they really don't. You can import them, but all the import gives you is the "tip," or raster image from which the brush was created. In other words, if you have about 2,000 .ABR brushes (which I have), you'd have to import the tips into Krita and then make the brush presets for 2,000 brushes. Uh, no. Thanks, but no. Too much work. So, if I'm going to switch to Krita 100% for painting, I need to get the brushes to do it with, right? Right. The hunt is on ... and I think it's going to start here. But not today -- it's so hot! It's 40C in the carport, and the a/c is struggling, so ... signing off for now. 

The black horse returns, and not without drama!

Spent the whole afternoon on this piece, finding out what Affinity Photo won't do, as well as what it will, LOL. There's a few things it just doesn't seem to do -- or am I missing something?? Good thing I know how to paint, and have a tablet, because a couple of the things I'd counted on being easy turned out to be impossible. Anyway -- done. And now I'm exhausted, and looking for dinner. (First thing I has to do was go to DAZ and buy the Millennium Horse!

This is a new one on me. I've been rendering it for ten years and more ... obviously it was free with Studio 3, waaay back when, so I never bought it. Never had to. Well, the Mil Horse ain't free anymore, so when I installed Studio 4 on the new computer, all the tonne of horse stuff I had bought installed, but no base figure! Ack. Anyway, $15 solved that problem, and here we are. 

 

This is a render out of Studio 4, passed into Affinity Photo to be painted ... next time I paint, I might have a bash at painting in Krita instead, because Affinity isn't nearly as friendly toward painting as the old Photoshop was. I rendered the old Millennium Horse without the mane and tail, and added those separately. I also hand-painted the shadows, because this is a backdrop, not a set ... and set up this way, the old low-poly figure rendered in seconds, even at max quality in Iray. That pleased me greatly! The adventure continues...