Category: Visual essay

AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref (Ref’ing on Classic Art)

I was going to call this the Art Forgery Edition, but realized that wouldn’t go down too well. My post on the 17th century artist Diego Velázquez made me think. What if I took one of those imaginary lost paintings and used Midjourney to create it, using –sref and –cref parameters? As a plus, he’s …

Continue reading

Zepped Again! (Part III)

In this post I’ll showcase some pieces of fan art I didn’t get around to last year or have found since then. Like the two fluffy yaoi romantic fantasies below. Jimbert of course.

Continue reading

Zepped Again! (Part II)

Once you start looking for Led Zep references, you find that there’s no shortage of how the band’s visual iconography spawned homage over the years. Take this logo for a vanity record label created by jokester Les Claypool of the American band Primus. For comparison, LZ’s iconic “Icarus” logo, with its Art Nouveau typeface, is …

Continue reading

Zepped Again! (Part I)

Here’s another topic carried over from last year’s Led Zeppelin May, which I wanted to get to then, but didn’t: the band’s influence on popular culture over the years. First, take this quartet of demon-like monsters from the manga and later anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The four are named, respectively, Page, Jones, Plant, and Bornnam …

Continue reading

Why I hate the Nirvana smiley face logo

I’m sure you’ve seen it on someone’s t-shirt: a roughly drawn smiley face with X’s instead of eyes and a protruding tongue. Together with the word Nirvana in its distinctive, elongated typeface – the font is Onyx, a popular one in the early 1990s – the effect on the viewer is striking. Right away the …

Continue reading

AI and the Window to the Multiverse

  One of the things that fascinates me about visual AI generations is how they allow one to peek into the multiverse. Not the real multiverse, mind you. That hasn’t been proved to exist. But an illusion of a multiverse, with different products, people, animals and buildings, all skewed greatly or slightly from our own …

Continue reading

Narnian Witches: The Lady of the Green Kirtle (AI Remix)

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 …

Continue reading

Scenes of Narnia I

Here I thought I’d present a selection of AI-generated images that to me seem to be from the books. The cave of the Bulgey Bears (Prince Caspian) Cair Paravel on a stormy night (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) The Northern Moors (The Silver Chair) Mt. Pire in the Archenland mountains (The Horse and …

Continue reading

Narnian Witches: Jadis

Now we come to my favorite part of the Summer of Narnia — posting endless depictions of my favorite character, Queen Jadis, late of Charn. (She’s the same person as the White Witch, but Queen of Charn is her first incarnation, so to speak.) There have been many stage productions of The Magician’s Nephew over …

Continue reading

Narnian Witches: The White Witch (AI Remix)

Or  “The Persistence of the Big-Ass Crown.” AI art engines have come a long way since last summer, which is when I started using them — being sick at home with COVID was the perfect excuse. They’re also a neat way to visualize a character using your own prompts. Such as, what would The White …

Continue reading