Cute Lioncubs

 I definitely like cute animals. So I try to generate them with AI Art Generators. Here are some examples:

Here's a kitten holding a red heart, created with Full Journey. 

Full Journey once was Bluewillow AI. You get 4 images with one prompt, and you can use the images commercially. Full Journey is not totally free - you are paying for each prompt with one credit. However your credits are filled up to 50 every month or so. The quality is quite nice, and you can choose the aspect ratio. 

This cute lioncub was created with Nightcafe Studio. Nightcafe Studio is not free either. You pay 1 credit for one image. However, you can earn additional credits: You get 5 credits for logging in, 3 credits for publishing your image on instagram, 2 credits for voting in the daily challenge. In addition to that you get 5 credits for every five images you create.

The creations can be used for commercial purposes (for example as designs on print on demand websites).

The third example of a cute lioncub was generated with Bing Image Creator. Bing only offers 1:1 aspect ratio. At the beginning you could read on the website that commercial use is not allowed; in the meantime it looks like there is no such explicit restriction anymore. 

Bing is free for anybody who has a Microsoft account. You do not have to pay any credits; you have so called booster points which help to generate your images faster. You can also earn additional booster points by answering certain questions.

Cubist cityscapes - a comparison

 Many AI art generators allow the use of an init or start image. Some do not. In my humble opinion the use of start images (which in my case are scans of my own paintings or illustrations) allows to create images which are special and unusual in a certain way. In this blogpost I will give an example.

The subject I chose is "Cubist cityscape". 

One of the AI Art generators that does allow using a start image is PicFinder AI. But in this case I did not want to use this way of creating images; I used the prompt "cubist cityscape". You can see one of the results on the left. Yes, the style is cubist, but the result is not very spectacular.

So I went to Nightcafe Studio and uploaded a painting which I did years ago with acrylic paints.

I remember that I had something of a cityscape in mind when I painted the image. But I do not do much planning when I am painting. Often I just paint, add one colour to the other, draw lines, paint lines and so on. 

I did not think much of the painting, and so the painting itself stayed in the folder, and the scan on my hard drive, until the moment when I thought it could be used as a starter image.

And here's what Nightcafe Studio did with the starter image. The style is cubism; the angle is taken from the starter image as well as some of the colors. They are muted, not as happy and vivid as in the image which I created with picFinder.

I think that using the starter image made it possible to create something away from the mainstream.

 

Henny the Proud Hen

Once upon a time there was a hen called Henny leading a very normal hen's life. She lived together with her fellow hens and a beautiful rooster. Unfortunately the rooster preferred hens which liked to be dominated by him, and she definitely was not that type of hen. After all, she produced the eggs which the humans needed! 

So she went her ways, picking here and there. (They could go outside if they wanted). Suddenly something shimmering caught her eye. Obviously one of the female humans had lost a necklace. It was a very nice necklace. Henny picked at it. The colours would fit her feathers very nicely. She picked at it again, caught it in her beak and threw it into the air. Could she throw it over her head? She tried it once and failed. She tried it twice and failed. She tried it a third time - and it worked! She was carrying a necklace! There was a small pond outside the chicken coop, and she went there very fast, because she was wanted to know how she looked like with that necklace on. Well, it looked not too bad. She saw the rooster running at her. "Stop it", she said, "I am the queen of hens! And I tell you whether I want you or not!"

Well, that is the story so far. I felt inspired to write it after looking at this AI image created with Nightcafe Studio more than one year ago...
 

AI version of one of my latest paintings

In a recent blogpost I told you about a painting I did with my PITT Artist Brush pens. Of course I wanted to create AI versions of it. 

One of the AI Generators which allow the use of start images is Limewire AI. In 2023 it was called "Blue Willow AI", and it worked only on discord. 

At the end of 2023 it changed to Limewire AI and you can now use it on a web interface.. 

Blue Willow was totally free; now on Limewire you can create 10 images daily. 

I love how this image came out. It still has the original colour combination, but the word "cubism" in the prompt did a nice job.

Happy Birthday Sticker

 

In my last blogpost I told you how I managed to make an image semi-transparent, using Canva.

Here you can see how I used that semi-transparent image for a "Happy Birthday!" Sticker on Zazzle. 

This sticker can be put on gifts bags, envelopes with your gift in it, and even used to fix the wrapping paper. 
 

 

Happy Birthday Red Hearts Sticker
by ullahennig

How to make an image semi-transparent with Canva

 Sometimes you need to make an image semi transparent in order to use it for print on demand purposes. 

I created this red hearts design with playground AI. I wanted to use the image for designing a sticker with a text on it on Zazzle. As you can see the readablity of the text would not be very good due to the opacity of the hearts. Now Zazzle does not have a tool with which you can change the opacity / transparency of an image. 

So what could I do? Well thanks to YouTube and Mey Aroyo's channel I found the solution and of course had to try it out myself on the spot:

Using Canva solves the problem. You create a file the size of your image, upload the image, put it on the file. You then select the image. On the top of the image you see the symbol for transparency. Clicking on it opens a slider with which you can change the transparency to your liking. You can see the result in the image below. You can then download the image, enlarge it, upload it to your print on demand shop and put a text on it. Have fun!

Painting with PITT Artist Brush pens

One of my birthday presents last year in September was a gift card for the big artstore Boesner here in Berlin. It took me some time to find out what to actually buy with it. Then I remembered my small collection of PITT Artist Brush pens. These pens are made by Faber-Castell, are filled with Indian ink and most of them are lightfast.

So I grabbed them and began to paint with them in order to find out whether I liked them enough to buy more of them. It was nice to switch over to "traditional" abstract art, and I deeply enjoyed applying the brushes to the paper.

The next day I went to Boesner and bought some additional pens and a pad of Bristol paper. I definitely look forward to painting more with this medium!

Be my Valentine!

 In my opinion Valentine's Day is not only for couples; it is also for friends. Maybe you know someone who loves cats but cannot have them - this would be the perfect mug to show him or her that you care for her. 

Kitten with red heart Valentine
by ullahennig

Combining my traditional art and AI Art

With some AI Generators you can upload your own images and use them as starter images (or Init images, as they are sometimes called. I'd already done this in the very beginning of my AI adventure, and then switched over to create images without any init images.

A few days ago I watched a video generated by Playground AI which described the process of creating images from other images (also called image-image process) in detail. Well, I thought, why not doing that again?

In 2018 I had focussed on painting / drawing masks with markers. Some of these paintings are quite okay, and some are not, like the one on the left. Now I wondered what would an AI Generator create out of this rather not so impressive drawing?

I chose one AI Art Generators, Playground AI, using the YouTube video as a guide. I have always fun learning new things, and this was a very good occasion to learn and practise.

So I uploaded the image on the left to Playground AI, and it created the following images:

As you can see, this image is somehow similar to the original painting, but only somehow. The round shape has changed to oval, and the color of the nose changed as well.

So I tried my luck a second time and raised the noise of the original image, thereby giving it more importance,

The image below has more of a handdrawn look to it, and the shape of the face is rounder. If you look at the leaves, you will notice that they look more like in the original drawing. 

I learnt two things:

1. How to change the result of the creation process by raising and lowering the noise slider. Sometimes a wee movement to the left or to the right on the slider can have a big impact.

2. To keep the scans of my handpainted or handdrawn images even when I think that they are not very good or even downright bad. I can always create something out of them with AI!

Getting ideas for your AI Images

 Participating in challenges can be one way to get ideas for creating AI images. However sometimes I read about a challenge, and it does not speak to me. I am a person who likes everything nature - like landscapes, flowers, animals and such. I am also someone interested in history, so I like historical illustrations like images of the roman empire or greek architecture. I also love fantasy fiction with dragons, elves, gnomes and dwarfs. 

In the past I had days where I simply had no idea what to create. By the way, this also happened to me when I did traditional art work! Now I will try something with Google Keep: I will write down short notes with ideas for creating images. Here's a screenshot:

In Google Keep it is easy to tag your notes. So I have three tags: "AI" as the basic tag, "floral" as a tag which describes the sub-category, and "Ideas for images" as the category which defines the usage of the note. (I also got "prompts" as another usage category).

The whole setup works like a database. I can add new ideas very quickly, I can find image ideas very quickly. 

Why I participate in Challenges on Nightcafe Studio

I have been creating with Nightcafe Studio more than one year now. They have got daily challenges, and you can win additional credits by getting a certain amount of votes for your submitted image. There are a lot of discussions in the facebook group where people express their disappointment about not getting votes for their creations. I must admit that for some time this kept me from participating in challenges. People do not see that opinions on art, on images whether they have been created traditionally or digitally are subjective. I had to learn that as an artist myself - but I always created what I wanted to create and not what I thought people would like. Of course I am happy when people like what I create, but that is not the main reason for creating art for me. But I digress.

For some days I have rediscovered the challenges on Nightcafe Studio for a very special reason: It makes me try out a certain theme on various AI Art Generators. Here is an example, "Sharks" respectively "shark linocuts":

This is how Deep Dream Generator interpreted the prompt "beautiful colorful linocut of a shark swimming in the water". Yes, it looks like very simple linocut, and I like the pose of the shark, but I must say I otherwise I am not very impressed. In the beginning of my AI Art activities I used this Generator quite a lot, but nowadays it belongs to my least favorite AI tools. The results are often disappointing.

Same prompt but this image looks quite different, doesn't it? I used Lexica AI here, and since a month or so Lexica is one of my favorite AI Generators. I still have a free account. At the moment they offer you 100 images per week (one prompt generates four images).

And here's the result I got from Nightcafe Studio itself. I hadn't added "beautiful colorful" in the prompt, so I got this black and white image. I never did a linocut myself, but for me the creation really looks like a linocut.

So participating in the challenges on Nightcafe Studio does two things for me:

1. It gives me ideas for creations. 

2. It motivates me to try out various AI Art Generators. 

Lexica, one of my favorite AI Art Generators

 Last year Lexica underwent some changes, and that process obviously met with some obstacles. I have a free account there, with being able to create 100 images monthly, and suddenly I could not generate any images at all. So I decided to forget this AI Art Generator.

Then, suddenly at the end of 2023, things went smooth again, and I now can generate 100 images on a weekly basis. I am very pleased now, because I very much like the results I am getting with Lexica. Here are some examples:

Prompt: colored linocut of a shark swimming in the water

abstract oilpainting

Racoon reading the paper in the bus