Halloween notepad

 

Writing do-do-lists is not something I would consider joyful. I do it because it keeps me from forgetting important things and dates. This cute little notepad with the adorable red-haired witch and the cute pumpkin face however will make you smile everytime you use it.

Cute witch and pumpkin with hat
by ullahennig

Gnome coloring page

 

Some time ago I watched a video about how to get familiar with your watercolors. The guy who did the video said that coloring pages are very good getting acquainted with your paints. 

In my case it is not watercolors but inktense pencils. Somebody mentioned in a video that these inktense pencils can be blended with alcohol. Alcoholbased markers do have alcohol in their inks, so I wanted to try out whether blending my inktense pencils with alcoholbased markers would work. I looked through my selfmade coloring pages (selfmade = made with an AI Art Generator) and went for this gnome. 

It worked. I applied the Inktense pencils on the dry paper, and then went over them with a colorless alcoholbased marker, even with some very light grey markers. Doing it this way I could create color variations. And I promise you: this will not be last coloring page colored with Inktense pencils and markers!

Prompting: Leave out the artist!

 Sometimes it is better to leave out the artist in the prompt. "Anne Stokes" is a rather famous watercolor and ink fantasy artist, and with some AI Generators you get beautiful results mentioning her name in the prompt. With some AI Generators however, you get images where a girl, young woman or female person is standing in the focus and the subject you went for is not rendered very nicely. This is the case with Blue Willow AI. By the way, if you visit Anne Stokes's website, you will see, that many of her paintings have young women or girls as subjects. 

So what did I do? Instead of writing "in the style of Anne Stokes" in the prompt I wrote:

colourful Flowers in Pastel Tones, watercolor and ink -- ar 3:2

Voilà! No female person anywhere.

Now I asked myself: What would happen if I added "fantasy art" to the prompt?

Blue Willow AI creates four images when you submit a prompt. Three of the four images had a female person in the midst of the flowers, but one of the four showed only flowers, in a fantasy style.

So it worked! And I learnt that it is important to know a bit of the artist before you mention him or her in the prompt. A quick google search will help a lot.

Blue Willow - a place to learn how to prompt

 Blue Willow AI is only running on discord. For some people this might be a disadvantage, because not everyone is familiar with the way Discord is running. However, now that I've made myself familiar with it I quite like it. One of the reasons why I like it is that you can easily learn from other people. You see their images and you can read their prompts. You can easily copy their prompts and change them. And you can easily change your own prompts and see what effect the changes have. 

The prompt for this image was:

Realistic, 8k, dolphin jumping from water, --ar 3:2

There is a bit of a sunset, but I wanted to have more of the sunset in the image. So I copied the text and added "sunset" to it.

You can see the result in the image below. 

By the way: I do not recommend only copying prompts from other people; the fun - and the learning - begins when you add things to the prompt, or replace words, with other words: play with the prompt! 

Strange insect

 I love butterflies. I love dragonflies. Regarding the rest of the insect species I must say that I either like to look at them from a big distance, or I do not want to look at them at all. Last night some kind of insect fell on my head, landed on my pillow and I had to restrain myself not to jump out of the bed and leave my sleeping room. I managed to get a paper hanky, got that around the insect and pressed hard. I know it is silly, but I cannot help myself. 

It is a bit different to look at insect images, especially the ones I created myself. I love the colors of the creature on the left, but I think it still looks very creepy.

However it is the result of using one of my inktense pencil drawings as a starter image:

The painting / drawing is nothing but a doodle, created in the process of experimenting with my pencils. I love vivid colors - and those inktense pencils almost have an acrylic or marker look. 

When I had finished the painting I looked at it trying to define a shape or get an idea how I could have it altered with a prompt. The shape reminded me of a spider or an insect. And so, in the end, the image on top of the page was created...

Using my art for starter images

 In my last post I showed you an abstract piece I had done with Inktense pencils. Using one's traditional art as starter image with AI Art Generators is a wonderful way to combine the traditional and the digital way of creating art. 

So I opened Stablecog AI, uploaded my inktense piece and submitted the following prompt: 

"colorful stain glass window"

Here is the result:

I love my Inktense pencils!

I spent the last weekend together with my brothers and their families in the South of Germany. One day, my sister-in-law asked me to help her with her watercolor pencils. Same as me she loves to paint in vivid and strong colors, which is a wee bit difficult with watercolor pencils. However we found a way to do it: Wetting the paper with the brush and then applying the pencils on the wet paper.

When I was at home again I thought that I would like to try this method with my inktense pencils. I've got a set of 12 and a number of additional pencils. 

In the middle of the painting I noticed that using the inktense pencils in the afore mentioned way (dry on wet paper) I still got some white specks on the watercolor paper. So I switched over to the more traditional method - applying them dry on dry and then wetting them with a brush. It worked. 

I learnt two things:

1. It was fun to do a traditional piece of art again. Yes it takes more time, and yes, there are these moments when I thought whether I would get a reasonable painting. 
2. Doing AI Art for such a long time does not mean that I lost my ability to paint in a traditional way. Doing one thing does not mean not doing the other thing: both ways of creating art are important for me and will be!

Angry Goblin T-shirt

 

In one of my last blogposts I wrote about the online tool "vectorize.ai". Here is a t-shirt where I used the vectorized design: 

Angry Troll Halloween
by ullahennig

By the way, I will be off for a family meeting in the south of Germany from Thursday 9 September till Tuesday 12 September. This means that the next blogpost will be published on Friday, 15 September.

Enjoy the last days of Summer!

Promptcrafting: The order of words is important!

 

The prompt for this image on Openart AI was:

painting of a stack of pumpkins in front of a cottage in the style of Anne Stokes

Well, this image looks like a hoard of pumpkins is going to overtake the nice little cottage house. It could be used for a horror story like "The night of the killing pumpkins" or "Pumpkins took revenge for being mistreated by human beings". Not at all what I intended to create...

Now, one has to keep in mind that the word order is very important to AI Image Generators. 

So I decided to change the prompt into:

beautiful cottage house with pumpkins in the garden in the style of Ivan Bilibin, Ernst Haeckel, Daniel Merriam, watercolor and ink

The words "beautiful cottage house" in the beginning of the prompt leads to the fact that the house is actually in the focus and you can see that the pumpkins have about the right size.

The creepy and the funny side of Halloween

Halloween came to Germany rather late - in the 80s of the last century. Now there are a lot of Halloween parties and you can see children wearing Halloween costumes at school and Kindergarten. There is even some trick-or-treating going on, although it has stopped during the last years with Corona limiting outside activities.

However Halloween is a rich field for someone like me who creates images with AI Image Generators. I noticed that in general there are these cute and funny images and there are the creepy ones. I must say that I am personally not that much into creepy images. But I could not resist and did that one:

It has one of my drawings as a base image. It shows an aggressive looking Goblin / troll /bad creature with glowing orange eyes. 

I wasn't even thinking of Halloween when I had this creature created. I was just playing around with using my own art as starter images. 

Now, with me being an owner of a Zazzle store who has to prepare already for Halloween I thought I could use the image for a t-shirt design.

But, as I said before, I am more on the funny and cute side of Halloween. 

 

So here's a cute happy looking bat. Isn't he (or her,
you never know!) cute? Bats are associated with Halloween, so why not use this image as a design on my Zazzle store. Of course the background will have to be removed and the image itself enlarged.