Swirling

 

This is the beginning - an image with  beautiful swirling greens and blues. I created it with the use of Nightcafestudio. 

Blue is my favorite color - it reminds me of water, of the sky and I find it an extremly calming color.  I can sit by the river and look at the water for a long time; and for me nothing is more beautiful than looking at the blue sky when I sit down for my morning tea.

With AI Art you can evolve images. A few days ago I discovered Deep Dream Generator, another Website where you can create images with text prompts. You can also use your own images and evolve them.

So here is the evolved version of the first image. The only words I added were "decorative" and "by Artist Alphonse Mucha". And look, what did Deep Dream Generator do with the image! 

And here comes the third version: The swirls remained, but the color changed, and also the texture. It almost looks like some orange slices were cut into the shapes of the swirl.

And of course, with the colour the mood of the image has changed - it is full of life and energy.

Looking for an illustration style

 After having published my first Short Story for children on Issuu and Gumroad. I am thinking about the next one. Again there will be images going with the story. The story will be about a polar bear cub and a young seal, so I am trying to generate some images to serve as illustrations on Nightcafe Studio. I don't want the images to be in a Pixar style (too cute!), so I tried out the modern comic book preset for DALL-E2 and Stablediffusion.

 Here's one of the images I had created:

I like that kind of style, and think that I will stick to it. 

So now it is time to go back to writing. I tried Scribus - the free alternative to Indesign - and Canva. I love Canva, but it is not meant for writing longer texts which wrap around images. It is possible to do it, but it is quite time consuming. Then I watched a video on Youtube which showed me how to have text wrapped around images with - Google docs! I tried it and since then I have been working on my new story with Google docs. Sometimes, the simple ways of doing something do not come easily...

Dryads

 Dryads are a type of tree nymph or tree spirit in Greek mythology. They are female spirits who are believed to inhabit and protect trees, especially oak trees. Dryads are typically depicted as beautiful and graceful young women who are closely connected to the natural world.

According to mythology, each tree has its own dryad who is born with the tree and lives as long as the tree does. Dryads were believed to have the power to communicate with other natural beings such as animals and other nymphs. They were also known for their ability to control the growth and health of their tree.

And here's another one:

The two images were created with the use of Nightcafe Studio; I used DALL-E as creation algorithm.

Series of Capital Letters created with AI Art on NIghtcafe

 I am having much fun creating decorative capital letters with DALL-E2 over at Nightcafestudio. Here on this blog I up to now have presented following letters:

• The Letter A
• The Letter B
• The Letter H

Today it is the Letter C.

I thought coconuts would be great to go with the letter C!

First Short Story published on Issuu and Gumroad

 I always liked to write. At school we had a school magazine, and I was one of the editors and of course wrote articles. I even wanted to become a journalist, but then I went for teacher training. At university we had to write scientific papers - and that was not the kind of stuff I wanted to write. I had to, though. Much later, when I was already working at the Berlin University of the Arts I had a friend who also liked to write - and we loved to exchange our stories. Then I discovered my passion for art. I was still working then, and I knew, that I had only time for one thing, so I decided to paint and draw, mostly traditionally, with brush and pencil. 

In 2019 I retired, and had more time for creative activities. I still focussed on art. 

In winter 2022 somebody mentioned Nightcafe to me - a AI generating platform. Since then I have been generating lots of images, and some of them made me think of stories behind these images. Suddenly I had the impression that I could unite art and writing in a special way: I looked at the image of a sad looking Easter Bunny and thought: why did he look so sad? I sat down and jotted down the story. The next step was to look for additional pictures to go with the story, and I managed to create some. In a third step I went over the story again, with the new pictures in mind. I had written the story in English - which is not my first language. So I passed it on to dear friends who live in the states. I got some wonderful appreciating comments and a few hints on grammar mistakes I had made. Okay. Now it was finished. I had written my first story and illustrated it myself. I had done some research about Gumroad and Issuu. And then, yesterday, I bit the bullet and published the one page Short Story called "Joe - the Sad Easterbunny" on both platforms.

Here are the links:
1. Issuu: https://issuu.com/ullahennig/docs/easterbunny

2. Gumroad: https://ullahennig.gumroad.com/l/dxcpkg

I love my Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons!

There always have been periods when I tried the Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons from Caran d'Ache and then put them away again. When you search for them on YouTube, you find a lot of videos on Coloring with them, but almost none about using them in a more artistic way. 

A few days ago I rediscovered them - and found a way to have fun with them. I use them dry - as a kind of underpainting. I also got some small containers with the scrapes from sharpening them. I usually put some drops of water on the scrapings and put the containers away for drying over night.

The next day I again put only one or two drops of water on the dried pigments, and only slightly dampen my brush. Doing it this way enables me to apply the pigment / paint like gouache paint - smooth and opaque. Now you might ask: What do you do when all of your crayons have been sharpened and you're out of that dried up pigment? Well, in former times I applied them dry and wetted them then with the brush, with the result, that the paint was not thick enough in my opinion. So I tried the following method: I applied one color dry - let's say red, and then went over it with blue dried paint coming from a container. I liked the result very much, and that's the way I am doing it now!
 

Painting with Neocolors II

I've got a lot of traditional painting stuff - acrylic inks, acrylic paints in tubes, alcoholbased markers, gouache paints, watercolor paints. I also have Neocolor II - watersoluble crayons made by Caran d'Ache. I do not know when I painted with them the last time - it must be some months ago. 

However, I somehow got a very heavy urge to take them out of their container and play with them. I got loads of crayons in blue shades, and blue is one of my favorite colours. I know that this painting is definitely not one of my best ones, but I nevertheless present it here.

 

AI Art - Modifiers

 In AI Art, words generate an image. Modifiers are words which have an additional influence on the creation of the image. There are certain kinds of modifiers - some are descriptions which are used by photographers like "close up", "medium close up" and such, and some define the style of the image by using the words "by artist xy". 

Just now I am experimenting with capital initial letters. Here are two examples. With the first one, I used the following prompt:

Beautiful painting of the Initial capital letter H,by artist "Chantal Misplon", art nouveau, decorative, intricate, hyperdetailed

With the second image, I used the prompt:

Beautiful painting of the Initial capital letter H, by artist "Salvador Dali", art nouveau, decorative, intricate, hyperdetailed

And what a difference between those two images!

Postprocessing Artwork generated with Nightcafestudio

 What do I mean when I say "postprocessing"? I mean all the steps I take when the image has been generated. In Nightcafe, I usually take 2 steps:

• Enhancing the image (the original image is 512x512; the first enhancement step enlarges the image to 1024x1024 px. This step is necessary in case you want to show yourimage on facebook or instagram. You have to pay for this enhancement (1 credit).
• Publishing the image (I only publish images on Nightcafe which have been enhanced in order to give the viewer a good image.)

I then download the image and open it with Gimp (the free alternative to Photoshop). I now

• use the filter "enhance" on Gimp with the button "unsharp mask". This is especially important if you have created your image using DALL-E2 on Nightcafe. 
• I go to "Images" and add more contrast with the "brightness and constrast" button.

I then save the image for uploading to facebook, instagram or google images.

However, postprocessing artwork can be more than that.

The original Ai generated artwork showed only one polarbear with a lightblue background. In order to create the image you see here, I

• went on the website lunapic.com and had the background removed.
• I opened the file again, added an additional layer with a gradient background.
• I selected the layer with the polar bear and copied it, getting a layer with another bear. 
• I now downscaled the second bear and moved it.

Strawberries or Raspberries?

 When generating the letter B on Nightcafe with Dall-E2 I decided to decorate the letter with berries. Now, when talking about berries, two kinds of berries come to my mind: Raspberries and strawberries. So first I went for a B decorated with raspberries:

Then, I decided to choose strawberries, and also a bit of a different style:

You probably can see the difference: Whereas the first letter is more three dimensional - especially the raspberries - the second one is more painterly. This depends on the way the prompt is written.

AI generated Art: What a difference two words make

 I am in the middle of a series of AI generated decoratively painted initial letters. In the late middle ages printed books used to have  miniature illustrations and illuminated initials, both of which had to be drawn and painted manually. I love those illuminated initials and thought maybe AI could help me create a series of them, maybe even the whole alphabet.

So this is one version of the letter A:

The prompt for it was 

Beautiful painting of the Initial letter A, with apples, art nouveau, decorative, intricate, hyperdetailed

I liked the result, however I wanted to have more leaves going with the apples. So I added these two words to the prompt: "and leaves". Here's the result:

How different those two images are! The first one focuses on wood and - of course - on apples. The second is all green with the leaves, and the red apples form a nice contrast. 

Telling stories with AI generated Images

 With Nightcafe, and especially with DALL-E2 you can generate as many cute animal characters as you like. Often the results show particular gestures or poses or have very special expressions on their faces.

Here's an example:

 I had the words "hen" and "jewels" combined. Now, looking at the image I wonder: Do we have a hen queen here? Or is she proudly presenting a gift from her cock? Where do the jewels come from? Will she be happy with them or will they bring her bad luck?

So AI art produces creative juice in two ways: You have to create images in your head and describe them in a way that AI produces the digital image. Then, looking at the image, your creative juice flows again and begins to tell stories...