#midjourney edit

[deepdreamnights]

Bio-Booster Armor Garfield (1985)

A classic of the 80s, hyper-violent anime boom.

Prompts were mostly built on this prompt format: in 強殖装甲ガイバー, Guyver: Out of Control, 1986, anime screen capture

Some photoshopped screencaps were used for image prompting purposes, and these are, of course, edited and captioned in post.

[dynoguard]

A Dinosaur’s Harvest Festival

Everyone loves a feast, no matter when you’re from.

Of the five sapient civilizations to call this planet home, only one (the one we don’t talk about) had no known form of harvest festival. The festival for our most recent cousins, the dinosovians, translates as “Festofall,” a corruption of the archaic “Feast of All.”

The “modern” (from the standpoint of dinosovian time-refugees) holiday is a synthesis of a number of similar festivals, mainly “Tubersprang” and “The Hunt of the Gorged” that merged with the rise of multi-species nation-states during the first industrial age. 

From a human perspective, Festofall comes across as a mix of Halloween and Thanksgiving held at a state fair. Cooking begins a full thirdmoon before the festival starts. Each family prepares a vast quantity of a specific dish, all of which is brought together for a community-wide potluck and cook-off. Competition is intense, though caring about winning is seen as gauche. 

The festival lasts for “two claws” (eight days) of feasting, carnival games, live music, dancing, and traditional theater. The potluck aspect is used by every aspect of food production, from farming to dining, to showcase wares and joust with rivals. On the fourth day of the festival, just as the sun begins to set the participants’ offerings are judged, and prizes are passed out.

The prize in question is an “honorloop”, conceptually similar to a blue ribbon or a medal, but taking the form of a ring of metal, braided leather, carved wood, or horn (tough plastic is always an option in the modern day) that is inscribed with the accomplishment.  These are worn over the winner’s own horn-tips, spikes, or talons as jewelry during every major festival for the year, before they are returned for the next year’s competition.

But when the judges go to give the honorloops, they are always wrong! Each replaced by a crude fake bearing a humorous, insults. The nature of the insults varies regionally, but “least improved”, “tastes like it smells” and “bland in, loud out” (very rude in the native podite) are traditional favorites. The honorloops have been stolen by impish bogies called “wildmolts”, “hollowkind”, or “Snappy Jarry.”

Dinosovian folklore associates the child’s first full molt with the shedding of their “hatching wildness” (Dinosovian children can walk within hours of hatching. A hatchling for the first three years or so is essentially a pet raccoon that gets bigger and more sapient every day, with substantially more bite-strength). The wildmolts are this lost wildness made manifest, in the form of macabre goblin-like pranksters.

The wildmolts, are of course, dinosovian children, who have been making their costumes and planning the theft of the honorloops since cooking began. The children hide the stolen loops in public places, and the winners must find their proper prizes before the festival ends or they must wear the mock-prizes at each of the year’s remaining cultural festivals and bank holidays (of which there are many). Wildmolts trade hints at their hiding places (in the form of riddles and puzzles) for treats and small toys. Adults are expected to play along with the ruse.

The second half of the festival belongs to the wildmolts, with adults and children alike participating in ritualized practical joke games that vary community-by-community (the uniqueness of which is a point of local civic pride.) These range from insult-competitions to hold-my-klem* reckless self endangerment. At night, live theater performances take on a more macabre tone and scary tales are told around bonfires.

Many of the more modern additions to the holiday, such as Aegis Shows, Pulse-Tag, and the Gorge-o-Rama (sponsored by Mr. Big Byte, Gorge Responsibly) take place in this latter half of the festival. 

The dual nature of the holiday symbolically conveys that even in times of plenty, the unexpected can strike at any moment. Post Time-Slip Festofall celebrations are held from November 16th through the 23rd. Mid October is generally considered more “seasonally accurate” to the original Pre-KT celebration, with the later date being intentionally chosen to overlap with American Thanksgiving. 

Festofall is, in human terms, a largely secular holiday and is open to human participation in most communities.

The above images were taken at the Ceratopolis Festofall celebration on the 7th-12th of Harvest Moon 2, 5 BKT, and were generously provided by the Dinosovian Cultural Council of Colorado. 

* a foamy beverage distilled from cycads 

[deepdreamnights]

The necromancer needs you. You don't need the necromancer.

Prompt and process under the fold

Prompts:

a necromancer surrounded by golden skeletons, laughing, hands full of cash, in the style of 1970s fantasy novel cover paintings

explosions and terrifying combat of the skeleton war, in the style of fantasy novel paintings

Compositing and photomanipulation, with graphic design elements.

[deepdreamnights]

RattleAxe

Marauding Mistress of Venom

Welcome to Planet Feyr, Pariah Planet of the Eternal Galaxy. It doesn't matter how you got here, or why you came. Feyr is power. Feyr is opportunity. Feyr is eternal.

And Feyr is inescapable.

I am tinkering with RPG Maker, but instead of leaning into the retro-JRPG pixel art thing, I'm instead looking at the aesthetics of 80s toy tie-in kids books and box paintings. She's a an early stab at it.

Process and text transcript under the fold

Whatever and whoever RATTLEAXE once was, it was FEYR that made her the monster she is today. No lost soul or banished prisoner, RATTLEAXE gave herself to the pariah planet willingly, surrendering her freedom for a chance at PLANET FEYR’s true power.

A flick of RattleAxe’s tail shatters stone and scatters foes. Even the slightest nick of her fangs or blades brings sleep, paralysis, madness or worse thanks to the many toxins the Mistress of Venom ‘s fangs brew at her command.

Despite being a coward, liar, and marauder, RattleAxe cannot bring herself to attack a foe without announcing her presence with a rattle of her bladed tail.

-

I started with the name. I'd been using lizardfolk to test different prompts for style, and the pun popped into my head.

A snake-girl with a battleaxe tail isn't something you can just prompt for, so RattleAxe is a multi-prompt composite. I wound up making several rough photoshop composites to use as image and style prompts to get the exact kind of vibe I wanted, somewhere between Norem and Frazetta, with a healthy dollop of 80s MOTU & D&D knockoff.

I'm real early into the in-game integration (the Felicias are placeholders to help me work out character size and such.) I'm thinking this rough size will work (I'd go bigger but there's going to be large-scale monsters and guys on steeds), but I'll probably need to get in the weeds of things to get protagonists of a similar size that don't block each other. I really wish RPGMaker MV it would just let you place the protagonists for each fight like you do the baddies. It would make things so much easier.

[deepdreamnights]

Kleinheart Robotics Ad - Woman's Day Magazine, June 1952

The 1952 model was a classic, back when you could do your own maintenance. Younger readers won't remember this, but back in your great-grandma's day, Kleinheart was primarily a manufacturer of electric hand mixers, transitioning almost fully to robotics in just five years.

That's why all Kleinheart robots have an egg-beater (even the much-maligned Mark 17 had a <disdain>decorative</disdain> one) in the right forearm.

Multi-pass Midjourney composition with photomanipulation and graphic design elements.

Prompt: a magazine ad for an advanced humanoid robot, 1945

[deepdreamnights]

Jackal Lanterns

The seeds of smashed Jack'o lanterns, if not swept up and thrown away, may take root. The twisted gourds mature over the course of a single year, until they rise to hunt the following Halloween.

Those in costume are invisible to Jackal Lanterns, though the stench of tricks will still draw them to their prey.

Prompt and process under the fold

Midjourney can't make a jackal lantern. It's current parser can't beat the 3 basket problem enough to put a pumpkin on a dog's head, maybe in v6.

Rather than use Dall-E 3 (because its slow as heck as I type it and I have another project baking there) I used the new in-painting tool. First, I generated the Jackals:

Prompt: a painting of a supernatural jackal, orange fur, glowing green spots, breathing green fire, running down a country road, moonlit night, spooky, horrifying, painting by wayne reynolds and wayne barlowe, side view :: a jackal runs through a haunted forest at night, filled with floating green spirits, bare trees, halloween scene

I then inpainted the heads and muzzle areas, and a section around the head big enough for an appropriate gourd, and changed the prompt to:

Prompt: a jack o' lantern, breathing green fire, spooky, horrifying, painting by wayne reynolds and wayne barlowe :: a jack-o-lantern with sharp teeth, glowing with green fire

[deepdreamnights]

The rarest film in the trilogy.

Prompt and a detailed process under the fold.

Multiple midjourney prompts and gens, composited, overpainted, and photomanipulated. Then combined with graphic design elements.

While these are end-point gens, this can give you an idea of how I go about making something "finished." Each of these is the result of extensive prompt-testing, followed by outpainting with prompt changes throughout the process.

Once I have my raw material, I can move on to the next step, the composite:

an then it was off to photoshop to build the rest of the poster, using the original Italian poster as the model:

Main Prompts:

three breakdancing werewolves, dance scene, discotheque background, wearing 80s dance fashion, highly detailed painting, airbrushed details, handstand, art for movie poster

a female werewolf in a leotard, tights, and leg warmers, flashdance outfit, dances in a disco, 80s dance fashion, highly detailed painting, airbrushed details, handstand, art for movie poster

Plus several others, and variants.

This was for a dumb pun.

[dynoguard]

"Night on the Town"

"We dated for a year and a half, the reception-"

"-was a mess, absolute travesty. We wanted Swedish meatballs."

"They're just like vorma. Something both sides of the family can enjoy equally. And we all also equally shared in the food poisoning."

"But that's normal wedding stuff, which is kinda the point. The dinosovian conception of marriage has more in common with ours than not."

"There are compromises, of course, but neither of us is very traditional, so its easy to accommodate most of our family's little demands. Like, I took her name, which made my traditionalist mom and aunt very happy."

"And made uncle Robert very annoyed, which I greatly enjoy."

"But to be fair, in a nod to her traditions, we chose to live in our own home rather than a multi-generational arrangement, as is thyrene custom."

"Sweetie, plenty of humans live in multi-generational homes."

"Can you not print that last bit? My mom reads your magazine."

-Dyo (34) & Melynie (28) Sledge, Newlyweds

Dyo and Melynie were made using multiple midjourney generations, photo-manipulation, and digital painting.

Normally, when I post something of this complexity, I don't give full details because its just a massive volume of information almost no one will care about. But I figure what the heck. Might as well show it off once.

MJ can do theropods pretty easily (assuming you're not picky, don't want feathers, and it doesn't need a tail), almost any other kind of dino is going to be a collage process. Ankylosaurs are a major blind spot.

So here's just some of the prompts I used to make bits and pieces of this composition.

photograph of a humanoid snapping turtle with a large, thick shell

an ankylosaurus anthro with a long, powerful, alligator tail, large, thick shell, green scales, white horns and spines, ankylosaurus tail, thagomizer :: long green reptile tail, over the ground, photography

a green humanoid ankylosaurus, photography, nighttime city background

photograph of a an attractive, heavyset woman with red hair wearing a sweater and jeans, standing on a city street, looking lightly up, friendly, happy, nighttime scene*

a green ankylosaurus tail, photography, black background :: alligator tail ending in a knob of bone

To get the image I wanted, it had to be built in chunks, assembled and then painted over and photobashed to blend the pieces.

Getting thyrene clothing to make sense requires some sci-fi hand waving. the smart-fabric cinches around the gap between the back armor plates and the main torso. The "hood" is a flap that buttons on one side and is open in the back. It's a cold weather outfit.

*Midjourney's dataset leans to extreme thinness, so 'chubby' or 'heavyset' will typically produce a normal looking thin-to average person, while "zaftig" or "plump" are required actual heavyset builds.