Let’s see what AI does with this poisonous green lady. For example, bringing her into the 1970s.
OF COURSE she’d have an electric guitar as her instrument of choice! That said, this one looks like a still from the movie flop Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the one that starred the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton.
But honestly, her era is the Pre-Raphaelite one, and to get these pics I used those artists. Midjourney would not generate a mandolin no matter how hard I tried (she got an acoustic guitar instead) and her feet came out abnormally large, at least a woman’s size 10. But, I like her threatening expression in the first pic and the more “innocent” one in the second.
The definitive version, based on Titian and Rembrandt. The mandolin is a little odd, but at least it’s a mandolin! Stylistically the painting is similar to this one, Francesca and Her Lute, by Charles Edward Halle, but I think the expression in the AI painting is more fitting for the character.
What else did the Green Witch do, besides play her mandolin? Well, she rode around sidesaddle on a beautiful white horse.
I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
The above is from “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats, clearly inspirational for Lewis’s conception of the Green Witch. Maybe I’ll go into the whole poem next year.
The artists in the above prompt were George Stubbs and Alfred Mullins, British equestrian painters, because Midjourney would not generate a woman riding sidesaddle with a text-only prompt. The attempts were laughable so I won’t post them here. I added Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema for the bright palette. The witch’s gown turned out to be a paler green than I’d like, though. Who are those figures huddling in the background? Some enslaved Earthmen?
Not only was it hard for AI to do mandolins and gowned ladies sitting sidesaddle. Serpent transformations were also incredibly difficult.
This one is evocative but jumbled in that all her limbs are transforming separately.
In this pic she puzzles over her next move. Again, her snake part is jumbled up so it’s not one coherent creature.
Lastly, here’s one of the witch and her victim in a vague Book of Hours style. AI still has problems with expressions, but in this case, it captured the lady’s look of feigned surprise, along with her hypnotic gaze, as Rilian asks her if she’s seen the serpent that murdered his mother. (Edits made for finger and hand oddness, as usual.)
