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.

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. 

Using Lexica in order to create images with DALL-E2

 Lexica is a website where you can do two things:

• Generate images with Stable Diffusion
• Search for images and get the prompts which created them. 

On Lexica, you have to pay in order to be able to create a certain number of images (Mind you, Nightcafe is free, but you have to do something in order to get credits for your creations - log in daily, vote in challenges, put your images on instagram and twitter). The  most important difference for me, however, is that you can upscale your images in Nightcafe,- paying with credits, and you cannot in Lexica. So I will not use Lexica for creating images.

However: Browsing through the images in Lexica gives you hundreds of prompts. In many cases the prompt and the generated image differ. I tried out some prompts in DALL-E2 on Nightcafe - and the result was more similar to the prompt than the image on Lexica itself. 

Here's an example:

I copied the prompt from Lexica and changed it a bit. It now reads:

Photo of a golden statue of a lion with huge wings

The original prompt included "a collar", which I did not want in the image.

Resources for DALL-E2 Part 1

 There are some really helpful resources for generating AI artwork with DALL-E2. One of them is  Dall-E wizard. You can find tutorials, guides, prompts and a gallery on this site. Prompts can be listed in an alphabetical order. Going through the list of prompts I found "kaleidoscope" - which inspired me to create the following image with the prompt:

kaleidoscope, blue and orange, digital art. trending in artstation

Of course you can change the prompt: choose other colours for example.

Playing with presets in DALL-E2 on Nightcafe

Presets are a set of modifiers which have an influence on the outcome of your image. On Nightcafe there a quite a few of those presets, They have names like "nightcafe", "epic", "dark fantasy" or "fantasy", just to name a few.

I'll give you an example:

Here's the image I started with:

Prompt:

medium close up marmor statue by artist Michelangelo of a Majestic wolf standing in front of dark mountains, photorealistic, intricate, hyperdetailed, 4 K, trending on Artstation

Nice, but a bit boring. So I decided to duplicate the image and add the preset "fantasy" to it. And here's the result:

And what does the prompt with the added preset look like?

medium close up marmor statue by artist Michelangelo of a Majestic wolf standing in front of dark mountains, ethereal fantasy hyperdetailed mist Thomas Kinkade

The red text is the text provided by the preset. It's the mist which provides a bit of mystery for the image...

Easter bunny - from pixar style to glass bunny

 Easter is still some weeks away, but nevertheless I felt like creating an easter bunny. So I opened DALL-E2 on nightcafe and inserted the following prompt:

photo of a cute laughing Easterbunny pixar style, highdefinition, 8 K, trending on artstation standing on green grass

and I got that image:

Well, isn't that a cheeky laugh? Probably the guy is laughing about silly hens which didn't look after their eggs...

So I thought about transforming that guy into something of an Easter decoration. I changed the prompt into:

blue glass sculpture of a cute laughing Easterbunny pixar style, highdefinition, 8 K, trending on artstation

and got this little bunny glass statue:

By the way, I tried the same prompt with Stable Diffusion 1.5 and I thoroughly failed. ...

Getting the result you want step by step with DALL-E2

 The first step you have to do is: Visualize the desired result. You have to have an image in your head - be it a dog running over a green meadow, a vase with tulips, whatsoever. I have been painting a lot of masks, and I am almost obsessed with masks. Masks however is such a general notion that it has to be specified. 

And that is the second step: Be as precise with the image in your head as possible: African masks? Masks from other continents? I wanted an image with Venetian masks - they are so pretty, they are the symbol of carnival in Italy. So I wrote the following prompt in DALL-E2:

Photo of a Venetian mask, medium closeup, photorealism, hiyperdetailed, intricate back lit 4K

And here's the Image:

Mask 1

Well, the image is not bad, but not what I had in mind when I was thinking of Venetian Masks. So I changed the prompt to:

Photo of a Venetian mask, photorealism, hiyperdetailed, intricate, 4K

As you can see when comparing the two prompts I added something and I deleted something.  This resulted in:

Mask 2

Let me add one important information here: I always let DALL-E2 create four images, and up to now I could use one or two out of these four. 

So Step #3 means: try to adapt the digital image to the image in your head by working on the prompts. Generating images with DALL-E2 is not something like hitting the "Create" button and there it is - the beautiful fantastic extraordinary image you had in your mind! It means spending time - and in regard to Nightcafe - credits. It is a process. 

The Magician

 Nightcafe Studio runs daily challenges, and the challenge of 10 January 2023 was "Magicians". 

I wanted to participate in this challenge, so I opened DALL-E2 and inserted the following prompt:

"Photo of a magician in a long blue robe, with a long white beard, standing in front of a fireplace, reading an old book"

Here's the result:

Well, the magician looks more like a nice elderly man in a cosy blue bathrobe, reading out of a fairy tale book.Not  necessarily that what I intended.

So I changed the prompt a bit. It now reads:

"photo of a magician in a long blue robe and a black magic hat , with a long white beard, standing in front of a fireplace, reading an old book, gloomy atmosphere, hyperdetailed, photorealistic, intricate"

And yes, this prompt created some changes!

Nightcafestudio: Working with DALL-E Part 2

 Okay, you are on the Nightcafe website and you want to create an image with DALL-E2. Click on "Create". This will open a page with all the possible creation methods: Stable Diffusion, Dall-E2, Coherent, Artistic and Style Transfer. Today we will generate an image with DALL-E2, so click on the image with the cool green chairs. 

Now you have to insert a text prompt. Try to describe the image you want to create as precise as possible.

I chose: "Pixar style 3D render of a penguin wearing a tophat, 4k, high resolution, trending in artstation"

Now you have to decide how many images you want to create. Each image uses up 1 credit, so you may want to save credits by going for 1 image. But: the one image you go for may be awful. So I recommend going for 4 images, and then selecting the one you like best.

I got those four images:

All four penguins are cute, but I decided to publish the one in the lower right corner.

DALL-E2 does not have additional parameters to influence the outcome of the creation process, like Stable Diffusion has. There is only the text prompt. This can make it more simple, but also more complicated.

Nightcafestudio: Working with Dall-E2

 I've been experimenting on Nightcafe Studio for quite some time now (two months, I think), and I have been using Stable Diffusion, one of Nightcafe's algorithms, for most of the time. However lately I began to experiment with Dall-E2. It works a bit different, and it has less ways to manipulate the outcome. But it can understand things like "close up", "extreme close up and silmilar photography words.

Here are two results:

Elephant # 1 with the prompt: Close up elephant at the lake 4K hyperrealism HDR

and here's elephant #2:

I used the prompt: Medium Close up elephant at the lake 4K hyperrealism HDR

I must say, I am quite pleased with the outcome!