Digital painting with the help of IA

Hello,

For some time now, you couldn't miss the surge of artworks made by artificial intelligence. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion... These new softwares are flourishing, and not a month goes by without a new one appearing.

From the artists' point of view, I don't hide you that this image revolution is accompanied by as much hope as anxiety. We are indeed facing an extreme saturation of the classic art networks (Art station, Instagram, Deviant art). It becomes very difficult to make a name for yourself. Not to mention the first layoffs of creative teams...

But hey, rather than grumble, I used Midjourney daily for a month. As an young illustrator, I wanted to share with you my opinion about this effervescence. So I made 4 paintings for my friends and family, each one based on an AI artwork. Enjoy ! 

This one is a tribute to my grandfather. He was an aerospace engineer, and spent his life sharing his passion. The keywords I used are something like this :

Old man with a kid looking at a plane - Midjourney output

The painting of Midjourney proposes a mood, an atmosphere. I really liked the poetic and calm side of the scene. Otherwise I was not at all satisfied by the characters, the child looks like a monkey, and the grandfather is totally deformed.

So I totally took over the drawing of the characters. I liked the idea of giving color to the child's clothes. It contrasts with the dark aviator clothes of the old man.

I gave this one as a birthday gift to a friend, a redheaded girl with a passion for scuba diving. A lot of testing, a lot of iteration to find a good scene. I used keywords like "coloreful, psychedelic...". I didn't wanted something realistic but almost fantastic.

Midjourney output : A Girl under the ocean, coloreful & psychedelic

I found this outpoud of midjourney quite incredible, we recognize the bottom of the ocean in its abstract forms. Everything is evoked, nothing is really defined. A blue/red opposition that is apparent in all the paintings. However it's almost too confusing, the silhouette is badly defined and the hair looks more like tentacles.

Bellow the final version. I had to do a lot of elements by hand, like the hair which are 100% hand painted with my drawing tablet. I added the castle and the fish, I thought it made the scene much more relaxing. 

Bellow some pictures of the work in progress. Focusing on the hair painting part.

I love steampunk. If you are not familiar with, it's an artistic movement, a kind of futuristic extrapolation of the 19th century. The machines are steam powered, using gears and complex mechanism. It's a kind of vision of the future where electricity never happened.

I wanted to have fun making a scene involving boats in a harbor, here are my different midjourney searches. 

Midjourney output : Steampunk galleon/ city

More than 25 hours of work and 100 photoshops layers were necessary to achieve the final design. Some pictures of the work in progress.

Art Deco, short for the French Arts Décoratifs, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s, and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. 

I find this style fascinating. It is characterized by very geometric forms, and especially the appearance of materials in architecture such as steel, chrome or gold. New York quickly established itself as the capital of art deco, from an architectural point of view, with the most famous example being the Chrysler and Empire state Building. 

Anyway, I wanted here a art-deco landscape of New-york ...in gold. Some nuances of material, of texture, almost to be able to touch the painting. Something in sharp contrast.

Midjourney output : Art deco, gold New-York city

I really like this Midjourney painting. The furniture are like gold bars, we see many different materials, smooth gold, grain gold. I added a lot of contrast in my final version, with the green of the ocean contrasting the gold of the city. 

I had to test quite a few versions before arriving at a satisfactory result. I liked the idea of the boat arrival, with the front in the foreground, but I ended up rejecting the idea. You can see the 4 different versions below.

I partnered with an art printer, who offers great quality renderings on different support. The size of the images are 16 000 pixels wide, for a 400ppi printing.

Link to my store (high quality)

More by Johann Delestree

View profile