Iconics iterations

The secret to getting decent AI art is patience and iterations. But you've also got to be careful, because iterations mean more AI artifacts start to mess with your image. I noticed when I finally got to do my "dark Bridgetown" on a big screen here at home that it looks like the whole thing is covered in Christmas lights; an obvious AI artifact. Anyway, that sometimes means just regenerating based on the original—maybe edited—prompt. Anyway, here's some more attempts at some of my iconics. I'm still not quite there with them, though.

Kimnor's face changed for some reason, and his silver-chrome eyes got lost. Both Grok and ChatGPT wanted to give him black hands for some reason. They kind of work as if they were gloves. What I think I need to do, honestly, is start over with a new prompt. Same for Cailin. And maybe I just need to stop trying to hard to get the wolf-pelt cape or cloak on Dominic. He'd only wear that when it's pretty cold anyway. I more regular light wool gray cloak would work more often. 

I kind of stumbled accidentally onto the swashbuckler justaucorps or frock coat for Kimnor, but now I can't imagine him any other way. It fits my vision of his personality really well too. 

These are pretty good, but still not quite there. And I'm even going to mess just a little bit with my Ragnar, even though I'm more happy with that result. I think I still want him with a bit longer hair on top, and a bit lighter blond.

COMING SOON!: A CULT OF UNDEATH supercut. I read over all my material, and I think with a bit of editing and reworking, I can actually finish off the project in a more or less 5x5 FRONT style already. If I hadn't been so busy and stressed out the last several months, I would probably have done it already. As a reminder, if I indeed ever posted this detail, my original conception was that if I turned these 5x5 fronts into novels, or at least story collections, then I'd have had Dominic and Kimnor as the stars of Darkness in the Hill Country and Ragnar and Cailin as the protagonists of Cult of Undeath. 

Of course, my second incarnation was that the 5x5 fronts were too complicated to do that with; they really needed to be two or three modest novels each, and it made more sense to split the protagonist duties, and have all four of them come together for the finale novel. 

That's a moot point. My novel writing ambitions are even more poorly realized by far than my blog posting or YouTube posting ambitions. I kind of hoped that I could get in on one of them like Sudowrite, maybe, before the tells and slop gets terrible as the AI model "advances" into uselessness, and it might assist me in making that happen, but that's just a vague idea, not really an ambition. 

In any case, I hope to do the supercut this week sometime. It'll take a few hours to write, but maybe I can do it a bit at a time.

UPDATE: Tried to generate more. Really having trouble with weird details. I can't get either of my normal AIs that I use to give Cailin a normal grip on her knives, which is really weird and frustrating. Did some new Kimnor's too, but they were only OK. One of them I had to crop; his face looked great, but they messed up his hands something fierce. I otherwise had to toss the more FUBARed poses, so I didn't get to modify Ragnar a little bit like I wanted to. For Kimnor, the floating pistol in front of his belt sash instead of tucked into it was the bigger problem; the one with the messed up hands had that too.

Also, I keep giving Kimnor a rapier and forgetting that he's a Shadow Sword. Whoops! Maybe I should just give him a rapier and make him a swashbuckler after all.