Greetings, artists from all worlds and all realities!
Today, I thought I'd share with you some insights on my current creative workflow. I hope you like it!
The following images were made using my custom build of Disco Diffusion, photo-manipulation and digital drawing through Gimp and Inkscape, and post editing/composition in darktable.
More artworks here!
The start of the process:
These days, I have to way to start. Either I use Blender to model and compose a basic scene (bust for portrait, light position, colors and simple textures) - like I did for this one, or I sketch something really basic using Gimp or Inkscape. I'm absolutely terrible at drawing, so I usually go with Blender though.
For basic shapes and simple modeling, I usually start from scratch and build up, but if I have something specific in mind, then I usually look for models on sketchfab or other model libraries.
Then the "base" of the final creation is done. Its nothing yet, basically just the "medium" on which the AI is gonna work later on. I usually start by passing that image through Stable Diffusion, as it is faster, to add a few details, genre, colors... to shape it further basically.
Which led me to this:
It's very raw.
There are a lot of noise artifacts on the image, the textures are inconsistent, the colors very tern, but it's already a better base to work on.
From there started to fun part. Photobashing details that I wanted on the picture, re-drawing the tubes and cables so they would have more definition, erasing all these little artifact around the portrait, coloring and shading a few parts to make it pop better... Once that was done, I sliced it in 9 parts (top left, top center, top right, center left, center, center right, bottom left, bottom center, bottom right), by dividing the canvas size by 1.8 (not dividing by 2 gives you a little margin for error when stitching the slices back together later on).
All these slices, individually, will be re-ran through Disco Diffusion with a different prompt (since the DD semantics are different than the SD, and MUCH more tricky). It took me some experimenting time to get the settings where I wanted them (for those interested, I used ViTB32, ViTL14, RN50x4 clips) but eventually got there and ended up with too many slices to work from.
Stitched them all together to get this:
I then did some final coloring in Inkscape before sending it in darktable for compositing.
Before darktable:
And after darktable:
