Andy McIntire - Fantasy Art

Deep-sea imagery

Not that I'm so into fantasy art these days, but starting with old, familiar themes for which I created actual artwork in the past gave me a quick comparison to see how Dall E would interpret them. Visualizing the impossible (or seemingly impossible) is certainly a compelling jumping-off point when trying out a new tool.

So, when I began exploring Dall E, a low-hanging fruit amongst my first curiosities was to dive back into deep-sea fantasy imagery, including some of the themes I played with when I began using digital media long ago.

Click on the images for more details.

Prompt: "A deep-sea vampire entombed in an ancient wall of coral."

I like how the first figure isn't vampire-like, whereas the characters below are more typical. I actually illustrated one myself long ago and never completed that project which ties into a lot of my deep-sea imagery in the illustration section of the site.

Though I hacked away at prompting various aspects like the flesh on the image on the right, the initial style and sheer detail blew me away.

I wasn't very happy with the female characters below, but I was surprised how the same idea turned out very well later when I prompted for the Cirque du Soleil AR-performance capture imagery. Notice how the female figure on the left is bare-chested, yet if I prompted for that it wouldn't likely comply.

The male characters below are depictions of deep-sea trench gods. The idea was part of a series of cartoons I made years ago, so I thought it could be fun to see the idea in a more realistic style. Of course, there are tweaks I'd make if I could rely on consistency (no glowing eyes) but at this point, I'd not gotten into those techniques.

Fractal characters

Years ago, I played with making fractal cartoon characters, so I merged fractals, alchemy, and religious imagery - working my way from heroes to jugglers to magicians and sorcerers to demons - to see if could scare the crap out of myself.

My objective was to direct the AI to integrate fractals with the forms of these figures.

Fractal hero

Fractal juggler

Fractal magician

Quantum quaternion sorcerer

Fractal demon

For my final query, I asked Dall E to make an absurd fractal visual joke that would make anyone laugh, and it gave me recursive banana peels slipping on banana peels which inspired a chicken crossing the road cartoon, which is posted on the Gen AI humor page.

On several occasions, I tried to leave room not to over-prompt Dall E to see what it would do, and it never fails to astonish. Prompting for specifics can be hit or miss.

I went off on some religious imagery excursions, but I didn't keep much of it, though some of it was impressive.

Again, I think oversensitive policies hold Dall E back a lot.

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