Artworks – The Library of Dresan

[seventy-seven] minus eighty-three: mondrian cat

Published June 9, 2023 by centaur

Just Loki, on the back patio, looking at a leaf ... with a little added magic (full size).

Producing this relatively simple image actually involved a fair number of Photoshop tools, several of which are new "generative AI" tools, but many others of which are just plain old machine vision magic:

Layers (stacked images) used extensively to save original or alternate versions of things.
Perspective Warp (a pretty impressive tool in its own right) to distort the image into a rectilinear shape.
Content Aware Fill (a new Photoshop generative AI tool) to extend the warped stone tile to fill the frame.
The Clone Stamp tool to complete the grout lines which were only partially filled in by Content Aware Fill.
Quick Selection tool to isolate Loki and the leaf into their own layers for later.
Selection > Modify > Expand and Selection > Modify > Feather to get the fine hairs on Loki's boundary.
Generative Fill (another generative AI tool) to eliminate many of the leaves.
More Clone Stamp to eliminate more leaves and minor imperfections.
Layer duplication to create an original and to-be-colored tile backdrop.
Swatches, the Rectangular Marquee tool, the Polygonal Lasso, and the Fill tool to create the colored tile.
Color Burn layer blend mode (with 57% opacity) to create the primary Mondrian effect.
Another layer duplication to create a new version of the colored tile to enhance the grout.
Filter Gallery > Colored Pencil which fortuitously greyed out the colored tile and colorized the grout.
Magic Wand tool set to Contiguous and 0% Tolerance to cut out the greyed tiles from the grout layer.
Darker Color layer blend mode to enhance the grout.
Drop Shadow on the leaf to make it stand out.
Duplicating Loki into a layer with Darken to make him stand out against the colored grout.
Adding Inner Glow modified to Darken as well (with a Choke of 14 and Size of 87) to eliminate some of the white halo around Loki.
Adding a second Loki layer, Normal blend with 50% opacity, to get his sheen.

I like how it came out, especially given how it started:

I looked at that and thought, "You know, that's almost a Mondrian backdrop" and I was right!

-the Centaur

[sixty-nine] minus fifty-nine: ai can serve up some creepy

Published May 8, 2023 by centaur

I still have misgivings about using AI-generated art to create final designs without human intervention, and I think AI art needs to address the copyright issue in a meaningful way, but speaking as an artist into cosmic horror, it sure can create some creepy images that are great food for thought. Here's a couple of cool ones from a recent project that I've been working on - great design concepts, whether or not they get used.

Bonus points if you can guess which work this art is designed to illustrate.

-the Centaur

[forty-nine] minus twenty: about that midjourney

Published March 11, 2023 by centaur

SO, one of my favorite characters is Porsche, a centauress warrior from the thirty-first century who populated many of my first tranche of as-yet-unpublished science fiction stories. (I think she only appears in one published story, "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name, and even that, just as a cameo). And while I have worked a lot to improve my art, I wondered what Midjourney could do. And I got the above result from the following prompt:

a centauress with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and bearing a double-bladed scythe with black glowing blades
- the Centaur

Wow. This is really spot on. Her hair is right, her face is right, her skin tone is right, her armor is right ... heck, even her slightly haunted look is right, and to go beyond even that, one of the variants looks like a slightly older, more grizzled variant, which completely checks out with her storyline:

Kudos to you, Midjourney, except ... she's not a centauress. She's just a person, a fetching one, I admit, but not a half-woman, half-horse creature with the pointed ears and black twin-bladed scythe of the prompt.

Well, shoot. What if we look at some of the other variants?

This one is creepily good in a sense ... it's got her forehead dot (she's a First Contact Engineer, and wears a pheromone bead she used to communicate with a scent-based alien hive species) and even hints of her mechanical arm and possibly ear. But this is just coincidence. Look at this other variant:

What appears is just chance. Here, her ears are rounded, the dot's gone, and the weapon looks even less on point. A lot of what looked right to me is just random features onto which I was projecting, like cloudbusting.

Well, double shoot. What if we refine the prompt? What do we get?

a centauress (a creature with the upper body of a woman and a lower body of a horse) with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and wielding a scythe with black glowing blades
- the Centaur

Yerk. That's ... just jumbled nonsense. Tweaks to the prompt to make it simpler just produced women on horses. Midjourney does not apparently understand the concept 'centaur' in any meaningful sense. I tried just the prompt "centaur", and ... um ... yeah ... no, I'm not going to show you those. They're just a guy with a horse, or sort of on a horse, or ... sort of ... in a horse? A centaur as envisioned by The Thing.

Okay, one last try. What if I give it one of my pieces of art, and then ask it to render it anime style? Let's hold that piece of imagery till the last, but the prompt is:

an anime style centauress with purple hair and a double-bladed scythe jumping in front of a waterfall
--the Centaur

Oh, lordy. And I'm not going to show you the one it tried to generate from the prompt "anime style".

Oh wait, I am!

Wow. Evocative - the top left reminds me of Cinnamon Frost - but it has little to do with the image I put in, and the attempt in the top right especially is nonsensical.

I am inspired by Midjourney. It's definitely a better renderer than me, and has good ideas about composition which I have already used in my artwork.

But I stick by my comment that it is an amateur which has taught itself to render very well, and cannot take meaningful art direction. As limited as I am, I'll stick with my own drawing, thank you!

Like this one, the image I gave to Midjourney above. It's not perfect, it's not well rendered ... but it is mine:

Porsche and the Scythe at the Waterfall, Colored

And she has four legs, a scythe, and pointy ears, dag nabit.

-the Centaur

[forty-seven] minus twenty-one: i hear there’s a new ai hotness

Published March 8, 2023 by centaur

SO automatic image generation is a controversial thing I think about a lot. Perhaps I should comment on it sometime. Regardless, I thought I'd show off the challenges that come from using this technology using a simple example. If you recall, I did a recent post with a warped bookstore picture, and attempted to regenerate it using generative AI with Midjourney. Unfortunately, the prompt

a magical three-dimensional impossible bookstore in the style of M.C. Escher
me

failed to pick up the image for some reason. After a few iterations with the Midjourney Discord interface, I got the very nice, but nonsensical and generic, AI generated image you see up top. After playing around with the API, I realized that I likely had formulated my prompt wrong, and tried again to include this image:

On the second pass, I got another, more on-point, yet still nonsensical image as you see below:

These systems do LOOK impressive. But they work like ... amateurs who've learned to render well. They can produce things that are cool, but it's very hard to make them produce something on point.

And this is above and beyond the massive copyright issues that arise from a system that regurgitates other people's copyrighted art, much less the impact on jobs, much less the impact on the human soul.

-the Centaur

Days 206-209

Published August 8, 2021 by centaur

Day 206, a sketch of Montgomery Scott from Star Trek: scotty headshot

How ddid I do? Still can't seem to draw a correctly tilted head, and face to hair proportions continue to be off: scotty comparison

Day 207, Nyota Uhura: uhura sketch

Umn, well, it is the same person, sort of, but she's looking down, and the original, up: uhura headshot

So, no real way to make these line up, but it isn't totally terrible: uhura comparison

Day 208, Hikaru Sulu: sulu sketch

Again, more or less the same person, but I made him look down, and what happened to his chin? sulu headshot

Overall comparison cannot be made to line up: sulu comparison

Day 209, Pavel Chekhov. I don't have the original reference on this computer, but I'm sure a comparison would be equally terrible to all the others, if not worsee. chekhov headshot

Drawing every day, posting when i get to it. -the Centaur

Day 205

Published August 8, 2021 by centaur

The back of Cinnamon Frost, after a painting by my wife. Drawing every day, even if I wasn't posting. -the Centaur

Days 203-204

Published August 3, 2021 by centaur

Day 203: Damnit, Jim, I'm a sketch, not a headshot!

Let's see how I did:

Huh ... not entirely terrible, though it needed stretching horizontally.

What about Day 204? A quick sketch of Dakota Frost:

Day 205 apparently hasn't been cleaned up, so we'll return to that.

Drawing every day, posting when I get to it.

-the Centaur

Days 200-202

Published August 3, 2021 by centaur

Day 200 - Khaaan! Let's see how I did: khaaan original

Meh. Head not wide enough. khaaan comparison

Day 201 - Khan, the man himself: khan the sketch

Day 202 - Spooock! spock sketch

Let's see how I did: spock headshot

As I recall, there was no good way to line up the face and the hair. spock comparison

Drawing every day. -the Centaur

Days 196 to 199

Published July 13, 2021 by centaur

Day 196: Quick sharpie sketch of Janeway, from the below image. janeway headshot

The comparison is not great - the face is way too long compared to the original: sharpie comparison

Day 197, Sharpie over non-repro blue roughs, from the same image: janeway better sketch

Slightly better comparison this time, though still not perfect: with roughs comparison

Day 198 was Richard Branson ... in spaaace: branson in spaaace

That's from this fisheye lens image ... while it isn't perfect, it captures a lot of energy. I particularly like the smile in the reflection (in both my drawing, and in Branson's window - he's having fun!). No comparison this time; this exercise was in capturing the feel more than the precise lineup. branson in spaaace image

Day 199 was Martin Sheen from The West Wing: sheen sketch

Not an entirely terrible likeness ... sheen headshot

... but my perennial problem of having a face out of proportion to the head continues. sheen comparison

Look at that hair, man. You can make the eyes and mouth line up, but that hair, man. Still, drawing every day. -the Centaur

Congratulations Richard Branson (and/or Jeff Bezos)

Published July 12, 2021 by centaur

Congratulations, Sir Richard Branson, on your successful space flight! (Yes, yes, I *know* it's technically just upper atmosphere, I *know* there's no path to orbit (yet) but can we give the man some credit for an awesome achievement?) And I look forward to Jeff Bezos making a similar flight later this month.

Now, I stand by my earlier statement: the way you guys are doing this, a race, is going to get someone killed, perhaps one of you guys. A rocketship is not a racecar, and moves into realms of physics where we do not have good human intuition. Please, all y'all, take it easy, and get it right.

That being said, congratulations on being the first human being to put themselves into space as part of a rocket program that they themselves set in motion. That's an amazing achievement, no-one can ever take that away from you, and maybe that's why you look so damn happy. Enjoy it!

-the Centaur

P.S. And day 198, though I'll do an analysis of the drawing at a later time.

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