Since January of this year I have been working on a series of interconnected paintings all descended from a single large fleshy red mother. This project is getting pretty crazy, with tentacles reaching out in all directions - the darker corners whispering close to madness. Allow me to document the process in a series of posts on this here immutable blockchain.
The Large Fleshy Red Mother
What I have been referring to as the Fleshmelt project all began with a large fleshy red painting. This is actually still a work in progress, and I have never revealed the full form of the painting in public. I worked on it until I had enough sections detailed to use those sections as the style image in AI Style Transfer, and then I started the next portions of the series.
I am still not going to reveal the full painting here, I am planning on running a contest to guess what it is from section reveals once I am finally finished. The red mother is composed of many small scenes, but taken as a whole she is also a single easily recognizable object :)
Sections of the Red Mother
My intention with the red mother was to play around with my favorite shapes (tentacles and tongues and weird alien blobs et al), and melt positive & negative space together. The goal was to create a painting that I would then use as the style image in AI style transfer in a related series of paintings. Style images that subdivide the space in an image without leaving large areas of undifferentiated space work very well for AI style transfer, so I was intentionally trying to paint an image that would work well for this process.
So uh yeah basically some weird fleshy red alien shit :)
The Photobash
Once I had enough sections of the fleshy red mother detailed up for some style transfer runs, I started the next section of the Fleshmelt project. Using a bunch of CC0 portraits, and starting with a ripped dude's torso, I made a quick photobash.
Ripped dude's torso
- cropped from a CC0 portrait, not my photo - the starting point of the photobash
A bunch of faces and some sloppy shapes - the photobash
I pasted a bunch of cropped faces from CC0 portraits over the ripped torso and did some sloppy painting and smudging on top in PhotoShop. I was intentionally working very fast and sloppy at this stage - I was interested in seeing what could come from such hacked together beginnings if I took this as a base image and started doing style transfer using crops from the fleshy red mother as style image (AI style transfer using deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle v.2).
PhotoBash (base image) / Fleshy Red Mother crops (style image) - early process
Things got very weird and very interesting very quickly! My process here was to do a style transfer run, do a quick paint on top of it, then do another style transfer run using my quick paint version as the new base image (all style transfer runs using sections of the fleshy red mother as style image), then paint on top/new style transfer run, etc., etc.
Here is the second generation of style transfer,
using my quick paint on top of the first generation run as the base image:
Third generation of style transfer
At this point I played around with a version that brought back in a little more of the original faces from the photobash:
Sixth generation of style transfer
I kept painting on top of the previous generation result, and using that as the new base image for a style transfer run with the fleshy red mother as style image. By the time I got six generations in I was pretty happy with the alien landscape forming out of the quick sloppy photobash. It is hard to believe this came from the photobash I shared above, but if you look closely you can actually still see weird bits of faces and even the overall shape of the shoulders / arms / torso in the red madness.
Stay Weird Hive
After this point I started bringing in some different style images, using other pieces of my art to push the fleshmelt project in new directions. I will cover that in the next post in the series! Until then - stay weird Hive :)