My AI art
AI is a dirty word in many artistic circles.
I like to support small scale artists and I have paid a few artists for Scarterra comissions. I'm not made of money and I write new articles for Scarterra very fast. I can only afford comissions for a few articles that I view as especially important.
In perfect world, I could comission dozens of professional artists every month, but I cannot. I do my best with public domain and creative commons work and free art creation tools, but that has limits.
Most of my Midjourney art is adequate, not good. But an adequate picture is usually better than no picture at all. I got really lucky with my AI portrait of Turoch which is damn near perfect.
I paid professional artists to illustrate my elemental ethnicity in mortals because I cannot seem to figure out the right key words to communicate elememntal ethncity to an AI program. exotic colored sheep, or cats is super easy for AI programs to do well but I cannot seem to make blue humans.
Hero Forge can make people of exotic hues, but I have not had much luck getting humans of exotic hues. Also, can someone teach the AI programs that Spiders have eight legs? Not between 6 and 14.
All my AI art is clearly marked as such. The vast majority of it comes from Midjourney. I've dabbled in other AI art programs. Once in a while I got a good result from programs such as Nightcafe or DreamUp, but I find Midjourney the most user friendly and I pay a small monthly fee to use Midjourney's program.
Silver Nine symbol #1 by Me adapting work from Pendrake via Nightcafe
by Me with Hero Forge
Bendek by Eron12 on Hero Forge
But sometimes I just want more lifelife portraits. For Duke Vern Palbuc I said "teenaged Duke wearing armor" or something similar and Mijourney decided to intrepret this as "teen hearthrob wearing armor". I ran with this and ultimately set up a romantic subplot in my RPG campaign. I got a reasonable portrait for Duke Palbuc because his specific combination of elemental ethnic traits could be approximated by real Earth people.
Anyway, Midjourney is a useful tool to help bring Scarterra to life, but it is only one tool in my toolbox, not th end-all be-all. And if I ever manage to monetize Scarterra, I will charge money for work with AI art in it, but I don't see a moral problem with putting AI art on publically free articles.
by me with Midjourney
Purple Cow Placeholder by Me with Midjourney
Speaking of exotic colored animals...
Special honorable mention to the The Purple Cow of Death has started as an in-joke with my local RPG book, but I sort of co-opted her as the mascot of Scarterra.com. And I use an AI version of the Purple Cow as a placeholder when I'm on a writing role and don't have time to find or generate art for it right away. I use her image a lot during Worldember.
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