Recently I've become addicted to using AI in my illustration work. I love starting an image with an AI generated piece and seeing what I can make of it. My newest favorite procedure is this:
I start a session in Artbreeder. Artbreeder is great for jump-starting the creative process for me. I can quickly generate some unique, inspiring imagery and then easily produce variations of that image. The variations can be subtle shifts, or completely new imagery.
Once i have a few pieces that I like from my Artbreeder session, I'll bring those into Looking Glass AI. Looking Glass is a Google Colab notebook that is free to play around with. I pay for Colab Pro so that I can have access to faster machines, but the procedure works just fine on the free plan.
I feed my Artbreeder images into looking glass one at a time. Then I generate some wild variations. I slowly add more of the Artbreeder imagery to the ingesting folder and let Looking Glass play around some more.
Usually while this stuff is cooking, I'll hop over to Prosepainter, which is by the creator of Artbreeder. Prosepainter lets you upload an image and then choose a section of the image, or the whole image, to be affected by a text prompt. The AI will slowly morph the input image towards its translation of the text. You can get some pretty wild surreal stuff this way.
I've been using it mostly to nudge the imagery more towards classic artists that i love, like Mucha or Klimt, or even Bosch. Or sometimes I'll start to see new things emerge in the imagery, and I'll tailor the text prompt to push more towards that.
I find adding "a painting of" in front of the text gives me more interesting results than the photo-realistic stuff that normally comes out.
Once I've done this whole process, I'm left with a folder full of really cool unique imagery for the day. I'll comb through that stuff and set aside some pieces to work on. Those get imported into Procreate on my iPad, and then I start painting.
My most recent adventure started as usual in Artbreeder, and moved into Looking Glass and Prosepainter, as I normally do. As i pushed the image further, it started to look like a Medusa head. so I asked Prosepainter to give me an image of Medusa. I loved what it produced, so I took that into Procreate to refine it.
While on my iPad, I started using some of my image manipulation apps and ended up with some fun abstract imagery. I wanted to do some simple white line character in the resulting image. Then I saw a sort of fire shape in the dark areas. So I played with that illustration a bit, and brought it back into one of the apps for this final look.
Quite a weird journey to end up with this illustration, but I really love the final piece. And I especially love this way of working. It continues to surprise and delight me.
Let me know if you use this process to create anything fun!