Yesterday, I rambled a little bit about wanting to depict the prophetic, beautiful figure of greek mythology, Cassandra. Today I'm starting work on getting some progress towards the depiction of this complete. This will show raw images that are entirely unprocessed, produced from Stable Diffusion models running locally on my computer.
The underlying prompt (with stylistic cues removed):
the mythical figure cassandra astonishingly beautiful but sad ith a burning city in the background
To the untrained eye, these images are beautiful reproductions of a scene of a grecian woman - but the prompt is not really triggering the part about a burning city. These were the best 3 of the first iterations which I generated as an initial attempt to get some ideas and a feel for if the prompt is working.
These are with 200 iterations - so they're very coherent and resolved images, but I will do lower iterations for the next sequence of images to see if a random seed is generated that allows further detail to be derived from the model.
It's just like exploring shapes and colours at random in order to get to something that works well as a starting point for further work to be completed.
From twenty further iterations, I have found the following to be rather coherent at 50 inference steps:
I love the pose and the composition of this particular image. The strange headdress in the background is ... strange; but the balance of the compositional elements of the figure and the burning structure in the background is so very well balanced against one another. For my records, I will remember the entire prompt and seed here in case I want to work on this image (or ones similar to it in the future)
7048236 is the seed
the mythical figure cassandra astonishingly beautiful but sad intricate, elegant, highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha and william - adolphe bouguereau with a burning city in the background
7048235
This got the burning city in the background sorta correct, but it still needs more work. I'll reorder the prompt for a few iterations and see what it comes up with!
Of the 5, this was abstract, but it was very dynamic in terms of compositional disharmony.
The first increased number of iterations with the same prompt was absolute garbage, and I don't know why I'm including it here, but here it is, so you can see the hazards of not paying correct attention to what you're doing...
The second iteration is increasingly coherent, but rather off-theme
Then the third... is just strange and not really of any particular world...
Back to a new prompt to try and generate some new images in this new theme, since those adjustments on the prior seed did not work out all that well. I think I will try 10 versions of the same prompt again, but slightly mixed up:
the mythical figure cassandra astonishingly beautiful feminine features, sad, a burning ancient greek city in the background intricate, elegant, highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha and william - adolphe bouguereau
This initial image is beautiful from a compositional standpoint, but departs from the burning city. The sadness is captured well in the eyes.
```` 6140883 ```
The next result seemed to have some more dynamic activity. It first looked like it was a combat scene, but closer inspection it makes it seem like some sort of dance scene. Ritualistic, but not what I am searching for at all, with any surety.
I'll go for some further iterations on the same prompt before I make more tweaks. Perhaps I want the burning city to be main subject and the character to be incidental. After the next set of images generate, I will swap around the order of the prompt to see if that changes things at all.
All these characters are pretty in the traditional sense, but the burning city seems to have been completely forgotten. So we'll redo the prompt, again.
... essentially two hours later, I've run dozens of runs of other prompts and not made much progress, but I thought this image was interesting:
I thought this one looked a little like "The school of Athens", just with many less figures running around:
a burning hallway in a greek temple the mythical figure cassandra astonishingly beautiful feminine features, sad, a burning ancient greek city in the background intricate, elegant, highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha and william - adolphe bouguereau
I didn't get there today, but it is a good starting point for tomorrow.
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