Daryll's Dream

"Daryll woke in a slow, hungover stupor, wiping the sand from his eyes and swinging his feet over the side of the bed. His soles met the floor with a crunch, and looking down he saw that he hadn't merely dreamt the scene of destruction from the night before. Half a bottle of whiskey and it looks like he got a bit carried away... this was the biggest city he had shrunk yet, and there wasn't much left of it. He yawned, and rubbed his belly, which rumbled in hunger. Time to see if there were any survivors..."

So I've been testing the waters with using ai tools as part of my creative process, using it both to modify my original works and also as story inspiration. In this case I made a simple composition in Photoshop from montage/collage material and fed it through stable diffusion to modify details, small parts of the image were hand painted and then reiterated to place them seamlessly in the whole composition, which allows me to fix common errors like hands/feet/face deformities and to guide the final image output closely from my original work. All that is to say, this image and the ones I will release later are not merely generated from text prompts, but rather they reflect many, many hours of work and hand-drawn attention to detail and originality.

This stuff isn't going to be replacing my main cgi work. But as those scenes get more and more complex, and I am spending more time learning new tools, I think these pieces could be a nice way of filling the space between my main posts. For me it has been refreshing to explore my ideas through a completely different creative process, and it's also been a nice break from feeling a bit lost and frustrated while learning Blender. I also want to acknowledge that ai tech is ethically problematic for many valid, insurmountable reasons, and that's one of the reasons I'm only going to be sharing work that is based upon my original drawings / compositions, and not the trash that is made entirely from text prompt generation. I have a lot of thoughts about it and am sure many of you do as well, so feel free to message me here or twitter if you want to chat about it.

Cheers,

-KC