Diamond Eyes

I’ve been creating tons of imagery with A.I, and using them to promote Diamond Eyes: Last Khoorlrhani Warrior. Rendering these is something that I didn’t think I’d get into. I’m realizing that it’s a ‘thing,’ but smirk at the term A.I. artist, really. Still it gets under my skin to read others being so judgmental of those of us who use it.

I recall what Santosha Ma, enlightened realizer, and digital artist has said about the advent of the digital camera’s arrival, and about the talk the ‘filmy-folk’ went on and on, so preciously about their craft and expensive tools. Creativity is not the tool, it is the impulse and the willingness to see ‘it,’ trough and manifest it. It’s that obsessive mode that has you forgetting to pay your electric bill or clean your house because you can’t get your nose out of what you’re doing.

It’s not the pencil, the paper etc. You get it.

Five weeks of beam radiation treatment and its side effects tend to focus a man on the bright side of his creative impulses. As I endured and healed, I engaged the Dalle3 console ardently for these images and marveled at how one contraption could listen so deeply to what I was describing and if/when granted enough creative space could bring a deep smile to my face as a sliver of my world was displayed right before my eyes so vividly. It takes details; a balance of details, and a simple and well written scene. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it renders straight out of left field and drops out lots of important details; ‘brown skinned,’ ‘pointed ears,’ ‘no three characters not four,’ … ‘no he’s got the dread locks, not her…” etc. Still it’s just a tool, and a really powerful one to get a great quick visual fix and bring description in your world building.

I don’t think it’s practical use is good for say writing an entire comic book, and question if getting it to behave and hold onto to a consistent visual script for just a page of panels without pulling your hair out and not having fifty to sixty cutting room floor images (albeit wonderful images) could be possible (yet?). For now I’ll save up my money to hire pen and ink artists for sure. I think for it to work in a large visual story telling manner, which to me sounds like the expensive tier of a subscription plan coming, you would have to ‘sign off,’ on a phase of character designs that it always refers to otherwise, your characters will always look different. Perhaps there is a better way to do this now, but I don’t know what that is. I do see other platforms out there now like Deepgram, and AI Comic Factory. Do write me if you know what the deal is on that.

Still Dalle 3, both Copilot and PopAi’s use of it, to get my feet wet, has been fun to play with, and since end of January had me hunkered down in cancer-fighting mode where I discovered a clear use of it; my novel and audiobook Last Khoorlrhani Warrior.

Last years project was in the narration, and production, a labor of love really, and creating the framework for my new YouTube channel which is finally starting to see activity, took allot of effort. I guess I didn’t expect to be doing this at right about this point. You never know what enters your life to help hone and ground your attention, to feed the attraction and bring excitement to the story to better frame it.