Snake in the Void

My newest artwork, Snake In The Void, was an experiment on my part in doing most, if not all, of the image editing, kaleidoscope filtering, and other such modifications, before passing the artwork through the deepdreamgenerator Deep Style AI !

Raw material

I started out with a Weave from Weavesilk

As you can see, the centerpiece looks very similar to the final artwork, but the surroundings have changed a lot !

Image Editing

I loaded the Weave into GIMP to do some editing.

This was the point where the idea to do ALL (or nearly all, at least) of the image manipulation before even giving the AI a taste of the artwork came to me.

I like to experiment with things, and after what I've been able to determine, I learn so much faster when, instead of following tutorials or guides, I just plunge right in and try to make something interesting !

As you can see, I was running a game on the side, while editing the image. I'll probably do a pluck for ATITD at the very end of the article, as I think it's awesome ;)

After loading it in, I created a copy of the image to work on, an went right into experimenting:

Waterpixels made a very interesting output, that I'm very glad with:

I then decided to see what I could get if I used the Kaleidoscope to create a background the centerpiece could rest on, using a copy of this Waterpixel'd image :

This made for an interesting play on making just the right parts transparent:

I like the overall vibe that's beginning to build here :)

I then played around a bit with Engrave and photocopy, finally ending up with a Mask where I made everything except the color black transparent:

I then used the GIMP plugin G'MIC-qt's filters to create some interesting variants, looking for one to pass to Deep Style (Yup, my signature force-the-poor-AI-to-make-me-art move is here !)

Deep Style... It's about time !

I ran the chosen image through deepgreamgenerator's Deep Style algorithm:

I choose the 3 last ones, which after the initial experiments I'd generated using the 0.95MP setting (I only get 3 of those images / hour on the deepdreamgenerator website. Normally it's 2, but I pay 15$/month to their patreon to get the right to 50% more images, and to support the creator of the site)

I then cheated by going back into GIMP for 2 filters.

(plz don't lynch me for cheating ;) )

The first one was the Combine Layers functionality of G'MIC-qt, to combine the 3 Deep Style images into one:

and the second one was the Canvas effect (I love the way it makes my art look. Nearly like actual old-fashioned art !)

and that's how I created this artwork !

Snake in the Void

So, what do you all think of the artwork ?

• Interesting ?
• too abstract ?
• You sure you're not part of an art-based mafia money laundering scheme ? <-- My colleagues always ask this when they ask if I've sold anything and I tell them I've sold a couple for 60-80$ since we last talked \o/

My less skeptical colleagues have been asking if I've thought about trying to sell for actual money too. I think I might have to set up shop on Redbubble at some point. The SuperRare artworks would still be the originals, published first. But it might be interesting to have the option to buy a shirt/mug/poster with some of my strange stuff on it XP

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All my artwork is released under CC-BY-SA 4.0