Continuing to explore some Valkyrie Visions

about 2 years ago

For this sequence of images, I’ve decided to switch away from Stable Diffusion and head on over to doing a whole bunch of iterations using MidJourney once more. There’s so many words to explore around the Viking combatant theme, and so much to explore that I fear I will be transfixed on this sort of imagery for quite some time to come.

Here I am going to focus on a slightly modified prompt compared to what I was using in Stable Diffusion, in the hopes that I will be able to get more coherent faces generated. Using MidJourney may feel like it is a few steps backwards, but I think I should probably make the most of the “magic” that tends to come with their construct.

beautiful viking winged valkyries with perfect instagram model faces descending from the sky on their wings towards a battlefield surrounded by a thunderstorm and lightning, wide angle, highly detailed cinematic headshot portrait, dramatic lighting, backlighting, atmospheric, beautiful women, painted by the pre-raphaelites, millais, waterhouse --ar 16:9 --test

I would say that is a pretty good outcome from the prompt. The problem is there’s one Valkyrie, not multiple ones, and she doesn’t have a “perfect” face (though, that’s fine, you can’t get a good outcome from every seed! - and we won’t explore the whole notion of what is “perfect” here!) So I’ll see what a few other iterations can conjure from the black magic memory chips of some far-flung GPU in the imaginary sky.

I really love the composition in this one, however it looks as though the figure on the right has an extra arm which is not entirely explained. The shield on the left hand figure is also not really in a “good” or physically normal spot for what makes visual (or combat!) sense, so unfortunately, as dramatic as this composition is, I think I may have to turf it.

It might be worthwhile asking for a few variations, however.

In the meantime, here, have a lovely, glassy eyed portrait!

This has a wonderful pre-raphaelite mood about it, and I would be so pleased if this was the first result out of such a prompt. Let us turn our attention to the variants of the prior image, however, which should be just about done generating at this stage.

Again, we have three hands. We’re looking for just two hands and two arms.

Here we go. This is an incredible image. I love the fact that we’ve got an actual “descent” happening here; and it is a mighty fine coincidence that the weapon held by the Valkyrie on the right hand side of the frame lines up almost entirely with the bolt of lightning springing forth from the clouds.

I am very pleased with this image. It will be up scaled as a candidate for Stable Diffusion in painting.

At this stage it isn’t even worth while looking at the other variant, so I will be settling for the upscaled version as a pretty safe conclusion for today’s generational activities in MidJourney.

This went rather more smoothly than I had planned today, and as a result, I am very pleased. Turns out several days of refining a prompt can pay real dividends!