Thread by @dbonneville

How To Use #DreamStudio #StableDiffusion To Create A Traditional Illustration.

(A micro micro micro documentary with an all-caps title to make it look impressive)

Let's start with the finished illustration (you'll want to zoom in on it, so click and read the small print):

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After 1-2 hours of generating terrible concepts, I finally landed on the idea of a cat reading books on how do cat stuff, including manipulating humans. Fun! Started with maybe 30 "cats in chairs" renders in #stablediffusion to get ideas:
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I liked the cat face in the first one, but would need to hand edit the body to add a book so we could see the title. Then I decided I wanted him on a couch, not chair, to make seeing his pile of books easier. But first I edited the prompt to give me library ideas:
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Now I needed a couch. Did a quick google(!!) this time to even get my head around what I was trying to describe. First time in all my #promptography that I did that! Weird experience. Found and image, which led to a new prompt for a couch:
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Composite time in #PhotoShop. Just needed to get all the elements on the screen in one shot, however bad. Rember, the goal is creating a reference to draw over. Here is what I came up with as the overall baseline concept. Rough but that is the point:
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I've got a rough drawing now in good shape. The #cat got flipped horizontally and mostly hidden by the book. Legs and tail added.:
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Let's add some wash behind everything pen & ink to get that authentic look going:
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8/🧵Now lets push the background ink, but not the wash, further back to emphasize the foreground. I drew the library on a different layer than the couch so it was just a transparency setting in #procreate:

9/🧵Final touch - let's vignette it to give it that authentic New Yorker Cartoon vibe (the goal from the start) and we are done! #newyorkercartoons:

10/🧵And that is the whole story! There are tools coming shortly (looking at you @artbreeder that could further optimize this process and make it more creative / exploratory at the same time.

It's a new dawn for #illustration creators...

BONUS:
The entire workflow to create the illustration was:
- Writing (no drawing)
- #dreamstudio #stablediffusion
- #Photoshop
- #procreate

Leave comments and questions, like & RT, and help push AI into the traditional arts.

Thanks for reading!

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Also, LMK if you laughed at the cartoon. Without the laughs this is just a vacuous technology post.