Goblins, created with AI and a starter image

I did not have a special character in mind when I did the illustration on the left quite some time ago. I was interested in the roundness of the shapes, and in giving the creature some kind of headgear. 

Now, with AI Generators allowing starter images I thought: "Why not create a goblin out of this creature?". Up to now I got pretty decent results with using Playground AI, so I used that Generator in this case as well.

I used the prompt: "portrait of a goblin, colored pencil illustration, intricate".

I am quite pleased with the first result: the shape of the head and the colors are similar, and the headgear looks quite nice.

The only thing which could be made better are the eyes. They are big, yes, but still looking quite human. 

So I changed the prompt to: "portrait of a goblin, big eyes, colored pencil illustration, intricate"
 

Playground created this image. Look at the big bulging eyes! It was just what I wanted to get.

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!