New Art: Vehicular Monster Slaughter #1 [AI collab]

I decided to make a batch of pieces using AI. I’m working on something more difficult, but I shared a couple raw AI output images Midjourney’s AI art bot created (based on my text prompts) with an artist friend, and he enthusiastically encouraged me to mint them.

This is sticky territory because AI does so much of the work, though what it does is based on how a person guides it. My results art based on a lot of trial and error, tweaking, experimentation, and going down rabbit holes.

Below, you can see the final image after I edited it in Photoshop, and in oh so many ways, and digitally painted over much of it:

Most of the final image is there in the original AI output, but my final version is much better.

The Ai was a small image with I up-scaled using Topaz Gigapixel, which is an AI enlargement program. But then painted over it. here’s a section showing conspicuous digital painting on the head:

And below you can see a section of the painting before and after. I spent up to around 8 hours repainting sections to my liking.

As for the content, the subject is a weird creature sitting on a train or bus. Definitely sci-fi, eerie, with a tough of Dr. Who about it, and with painterly references to the modernist figurative painting of such luminaries as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and even some of Gerhard’s Richter’s work.

AI is a very weird beast, and collaborating with it is a bit like teaming up with an alien. It’s intelligence is different than our own, and comes up with strange things we wouldn’t.

I’m planning to do about 5 more of these.

I did mint this one, and list it, but as I’d expected the NFT community was with a few exceptions (all artists) not the least interested.