Mucha Carah

I'm having a helluva lot of fun with MidJourney these days, despite all the grumblings against it. It's just too much fun to see my written words bloom into images, to see my characters and settings interpreted in dozens of different ways. 

This is MJ's take on Carah, the heroine of books 3, 4, and 5 of the Falcons Saga -- if artists Alphonse Mucha and Julie Bell collaborated. The first was done with MJ's version 4, the last two are version 5. Of course, v4 can't get the hands right. I've had very little success with birds' wings either. Hands and wings, as common as they must be in source imagery, are a mystery to this ai. I do find it interesting, however, that despite my prompt not once including the word "book," the ai insisted that a sorceress would be holding a book. Every single image, except the last one, featured a book.

https://www.courtellyn.com/2019/05/06/sons-of-the-falcon/

MidJourney: Banned Words & Creepy Images

 To follow up on my previous post about MidJourney:

I'm learning the ins and outs of the AI's language. Sometimes I have no idea what the commands mean that I'm using but they produce fabulous results. And just because some words are banned from the AI's engine doesn't mean it won't produce some seriously disturbing stuff.

Lately, I'm considering writing a short story involving the Native American legend of the wendigo, a monster that personifies insatiable hunger and greed. So I plugged Ojibwe teach/scholar Basil H. Johnston's description of the the wendigo into the MidJourney's prompt window:

The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody ... Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.

"Flesh" and "bloody" are banned words, so I removed them, but the AI accepted the rest and returned the following creepy results:

Whew, is that fun or what?

I found it interesting that most of the images had horns. I had to specify "--no horns" or "horns ::-2" for the latter image to pop. After researching the wendigo a bit I learned that later interpretations, after Europeans brought their own legends from the Old World, horns started showing up in descriptions of the monster. Why is any scholar's guess. And I'm sure there are some fairly good guesses out there.

Hmm, now to go enjoy ... lunch.

Mega Distraction: MidJourney

I have discovered MidJourney, the AI art generator. One of my favorite hobbies is to use GIMP to create imagery -- or try to. MJ makes the process a joy because I never know what I'm gonna get. And I get to PAINT WITH WORDS! I went through my 25 freebie generations in two days. By that time I was hooked, so I subscribed. 

Once I studied up on tutorials and learned the commands, I started generating ideas for book covers. The goal is to release new editions of past works on multiple platforms instead of just on Amazon Kindle. After several terrible results, MJ finally got what I was talking about and produced a glowing white lute for Sanjen's stories, and a dramatic battle ground with standing stones for the Falcons Saga, and a stylized image of a woman in the Sahara for my WIP.

But my prompts are definitely pushing MJ's limits. It has a real problem with birds. I want it to create images of falcons, right? "Falcons" is prominent in the prompt, but MJ is giving me hawks, eagles, birds with hawk bodies and pigeon heads, birds with funky-shaped talons, sometimes with three feet, or two feet with six twisty toes, sometimes a bird with one wing, or a bird with one gorgeous wing and one weird half-wing. It's been hilarious and frustrating. An otherwise gorgeous usable image will be ruined by one bizarre detail like this.

The latest fiasco (and most bizarre yet) was a gorgeous elven castle surrounded by fantastical trees (I was trying to get MJ to create Avidan Wood for a new cover for Blood of the Falcon), and the otherwise gorgeous image was ruined when MJ decided to put big block letters right in the middle of picture! This caused me to think it referenced someone else's promo image elsewhere on the web and arranged random letters in the same place. (see below)

No, no, no, you silly AI.

Point is, trying to create the perfect cover image by choosing the right words has been a glorious challenge, and I haven't written much on my WIP in the past week. Plus, now I've got a new LegendFire contest to work on, so MJ will have to go on the back burner.

Here are some of the bizarre results MJ gave me:

Why the nonsense letters in the middle, MJ??? This was perfect!

What is up with the bird on the left? Creepy eye and an irradiated left talon... tsk tsk.

Yet another attempt at bird anatomy. The falcon on the left is perfect, but for that weird right foot. While the bird on the right is somehow aloft with only half wing, and again with the random funky feet. I think there's an extra disembodied foot there somewhere...