Preface

Starting to create a template for standardizing how I display these shots. Anyways, Inané is the name of an EP by Piing. The subject of the EP, Inané, is supposed to be the personification of someone who feels inane; worthless, lacking purpose and substance. I had the idea for the composition after going into a Kinokuniya and finding a bunch of origami paper. I realized that origami paper, and all of crafting materials for that matter, were basically vessels of potential energy, not to be confused with potential energy in the Newtonian sense. These raw materials have the potential to be anything someone might want them to be, yet without form they come off as inane. The subject in the composition has origami paper in the back of their hair as a representation of the infinite, yet untapped potential that we all hold. It is a reminder that although actions are conducted within the tangible world, the purpose of our actions must be intrinsically discovered. Otherwise, we will never appreciate the bundle of impressions that is the ego, and will forever fail to establish a healthy relationship with it.

Technique

This piece was a mixed medium piece. The first step was to create the subject, which I discussed the inspiration for in the preface. Using my iPhone camera, photographed a side profile of myself. Due to lens distortion, bad lighting, and my very unruly hair, the photo itself was pretty bad.

Additionally, this EP was not about me, so I did not want to use my exact likeness as the face of the cover art. I used an image-to-image diffusion algorithm to generate a subject with identical framing and similar features to me. A benefit of using this method was that by editing the weights and biases of the code, I was actually able to fine tune the image to something in latent space that I was happy with. Additionally, the image did not suffer from any of the same artifacts my photograph did, and the hair was a lot easier to clean up in Krita.

After touching up the face, I used InvokeAI to inpaint colored paper into the hair in abstract formations. Then, I created the background in Figma, overlayed the subject, and then overlayed a paper texture from a DESIGNSYNDROME texture pack.

Finally, I used the Kolker Brush font to write "Inané" in the bottom right corner and the composition was finished.