She reclines observing the tree where the moonlight shines refracted.
Illuminated full as day, she becomes the landscape of the night.
Illuminance is a work generated by the modes of AI and also marker and acrylic paint. Minted on NFT Showroom today, Illuminance crosses the boundary between digital and analogue. My process creating Illuminance is detailed below.
Initial Marker Pen Drawing
Sketched by my wife and I in less than a minute on a large sheet of gloss paper (A2). Permanent marker pens made the lines. A person lies before a landscape of a hill, a tree, and some clouds.
CLIP Guided Diffusion
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12a_Wrfi2_gwwAuN3VvMTwVMz9TfqctNj
I have never used any of these notebooks before and so my ignorance will show through. I stumbled across a useful collection of them, which is below in Acknowledgements. The link to each one I use is also given below the section heading where it is used.
CLIP-guided diffusion takes a 'text prompt' and makes an image using AI. It can also take an 'initial image' and 'image prompts'.
I give the Google Colabs notebook the line drawing made by my wife and I as an initial image along with the following text prompt:
'woman lying in front of hills and clouds and a tree'
Because this is my first attempt, I have no idea what to expect, and get a fairly unsatisfactory result. Using GIMP, I remove white from the image, change the opacity and overlay onto the line drawing.
I then use CLIP-guided diffusion again with different parameters.
The text prompt was changed:
'woman and blue sky with clouds and hills and a tree'
I like this a lot more. I can see what I want in it. Time for the paints.
Desk Printer Plus Acrylic Paint
I print out a copy using a household desktop printer, and I paint it.
I only have old scraps of paint. You can see the tones I was limited to. The tube that is flipped over is another shade of yellow.
I will refer to the above painted image as Input A.
I am fairly happy. I especially like how the paint is still wet in the image.
Google Colabs Pro
At this stage I was locked out of Colabs for using too many resources. Apparently these mystery notifications happen, especially on the free account, and Google don't really explain the exact limits.
I paid $10 for a month of Colabs Pro and also put some more space on my Drive so that I can play more with AI as a mode of art in addition to my existing ones.
Disco Diffusion
Many of the AI art notebooks are limited to 256x256 or 512x512 for their outputs, because of what they are based on.
Below is the first output from Disco Diffusion with Input A as an initial image.
The text prompt was as follows:
woman on bed looking out at landscape
But it's quite pixelated, so I use another notebook which upscales an image 3.5x and repairs the output to look smooth and natural.
Real-ESRGAN Inference
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1k2Zod6kSHEvraybHl50Lys0LerhyTMCo
Below you can see the result. It's decent, but not quite good enough. Worth showing here. And worth keeping for use later.
I would have called it "Piece of Mind". But it's a rejected draft. Retained though, the above image is Input B.
Disco Diffusion Turbo
I move to a different Colabs notebook. I use Input A again.
The text prompt was as follows:
woman lying down, cloud, tree, hills, sky
The above image is Input C.
This one got an audible reaction out of my wife because she was mildly surprised at the quality. I like it too. We move into the night. But the woman is too blurred and invisible, and the style is not at all like acrylics. Also retained for use as in image prompt.
Final Mix
For the final mix, I used Disco Diffusion Turbo (with animation set to none). The settings were modified to stay somewhat true to the initial image. Several attempts were made, and the best was chosen.
The initial image was Input A.
Input B and Input C were given as image prompts.
Text prompt was as follows:
woman on bed, white sheets, trees, hills, clouds
I then used Real-ESRGAN inference again twice, with tiling required, to upscale to the final work.
Here it is. I am very satisfied.
Illuminance
Initial Beside Final
To me, the similarity is striking. The position of the reclining figure and the tree have been kept. What was initially a cloud became the moon.
Also notable is how true the scripts were to the palette. The similarity can be seen.
NFT Showroom
Illuminance will be minted on NFT Showroom immediately after this is posted.
https://nftshowroom.com/almightymelon/gallery/almightymelon_assorted-works-by-look_illuminance
Acknowledgements
Massive thanks to @kaliyuga for their library, which set me going.
https://peakd.com/hive-177949/@kaliyuga/kaliyugas-library-of-ai-google-colab-notebooks
Thanks to all the people who wrote the code for the notebooks linked above.
And, most of all, thanks to my wife for her input and feedback.
Follow Me
My NFT Showroom Gallery is here:
https://nftshowroom.com/almightymelon/gallery
I am going to do a series now that fuses these methods into some of my existing modes of art and NFT production. Follow @almightymelon to have them on your feed.
