So this weekend, armed with a couple of AI art programs, I started noodling around to see what I could do, and if I could put together one of my Weird Little Comic ideas using mostly retouched computer generated imagery.
These nine pages were the result.
Using one program to render line work on the output from other programs leaves some fairly obvious no-human-involved artifact in places, even retouched. (I drew the figures, obviously.)
It works better in some places than others. Since most of the AI art programs output very small, I was splicing and dicing a lot to get enough to fit—this is 8.5 x 11, 300 dpi.
Obviously there has to be an in-universe explanation for why everything is mushy.
This is my favorite page of the whole thing.
When you run a “smart” inker over things—this was Clip2Comic, the best one I’ve found—it tends to barf everything out at the same lineweight and flatten the foreground/background. I pushed it back a little with an airbrush layer set to “screen”—you can see it behind Thoth.
To do this one, I started with the Wombo app, took it to Prisma to tweak the colors, took that to Procreate, drew the character and books and retouched all the janky bits, then to Clip2Comic to do linework, then back to Procreate to retouch. And did word balloons in ComicDraw.
The computer choked on trying to lineart waterfalls. I did a lot of retouching on this page.
And finally, the...not actually an ending, exactly, but that’s where I paused, anyway, because it was mostly a technical experiment, dammit.
Anyway, In Conclusion—does it work visually? I think the answer is “sort of.” I’m very aware of the weirdnesses as an artist, obviously. As a dream sequence, the messed up architecture kinda works, but how long can you get away with it?
Sooner or later the reader is probably gonna notice that nothing takes place in the same scene from a different angle.
I think if I wanted to really get my teeth into a project like this, I’d probably have better luck with a program that relies heavily on altering existing photos. That way you could take two or three photos of a space from different angles and let the machine loose.
I’ve fooled with stuff like that in the past, and enjoyed it, but the trade-off is the lack of batshit surrealism. Artbreeder can alllllmost do it with child images, but development has focused on portraits, not scenery.
That said, it has real benefits too. As much as I grumble about retouching, though, I did this in a weekend. I’d be lucky to do two whole pages if I was drawing it all by hand.
That’s the current extent of my thoughts on the matter. Artists and comics peeps, anybody who’s played with this stuff, feel free to weigh in!
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Now, like my friend @pecunium, that stem screams “papyrus” to me, not hemp. So I went digging about hemp use in Ancient Egypt and oh boy, is that a rabbit hole of wishful thinking.
Apparently—and a real scholar please correct me if I’m wrong—the story goes that there’s a plant called Shemshemet used medicinally in Egypt in Ye Very Olden Days. Nobody knows what it is. Then in 1934, a translator finds a reference to a hemp rope from Shemshemet in the Bible.
(Where? I dunno. I can’t find it, but I just work here and presumably translators know more than I do.) So this guy, Dawson, then goes to a Pyramid Text where the pharaoh “ties the strings” of the plant—which is actually the Smsmt plant, because vowels are for the weak.
Had to pull out PALADIN’S GRACE to look up what I’d previously said about some of the characters and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t touched by the notes on what readers have highlighted.
A LOT of you liked this line.
And nearly two hundred knitters really liked the discussion of murdering someone with sock needles.
Honestly, I find this argument fascinating. Almost everyone agrees that yes, the books are also deeply humorless, yes, the movie is true to that, but many people seem annoyed if anyone mentions that fact.
That was the single most humorless movie I have ever seen. There is one joke, delivered by Jason Momoa, in the first ten minutes. Cherish it. There will not be another.
Uh…let me think. Okay. You know those big concept art books that are like THE ART OF THAT MOVIE and THE ART OF THAT OTHER MOVIE? If you flip through one of those, called THE ART OF DUNE, while listening to Philip Glass, you would largely replicate the experience of this movie.
Basically it’s very pretty and very long and everyone dies.
(That’s not a spoiler. It’s Dune. What did you expect?)