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.
