Playing the fool.

about 2 years ago

A time to play with a deck of Tarot cards for inspiration (and a probable endless source of imagery) - So I have decided to commence playing with the notion of The Fool.

This should be a fun endeavour since I know nothing at all about Tarot, its history, the cards, or any other such elements. So I will learning as I go, and who knows, I may end up with (Eventually) a complete, cohesive deck by the time that I am done; or, perhaps I won't end up with a complete, cohesive deck.

Only time will tell.

The images below are a mixture of outputs from both Stable Diffusion and MidJourney. I figure I may as well mix and match while I have access to both, but once my 4090 (yes, I ordered one) arrives, I will probably devote the majority of my efforts towards becoming a master of the various Stable Diffusion techniques and doing things on my computer locally, as opposed to paying a monthly subscription fee.

It should pay itself off, in... 3.5 years. :D (The cost of my 4090 divided by my MidJourney subscription fee in my local currency). Send help. :o

Anyway, to the images, using generic, guaranteed to get results prompts.

Prompt used:

fool of a woman wearing ragged clothes and stockings without shoes with feathers in her hair in the epic fantasy art concept character art in the style of fantasy, intricate, beautiful lighting, by stanley artgerm lau, greg rutkowski, thomas kindkade, alphonse mucha, loish, norman rockwell

2190632240

3070203111

2849369434

So far these results lack a bit of coherence, but that is something I can work on by refining the prompt or alternatively, giving the generator more iterations to work through.

Switching over now to MidJourney, we can see its specific stylings coming through. (Same prompt, seeds not recorded)

There's a few more images that were interesting generated with the prompt, but I am not sure that I like them all that much. I feel as though the prompt (and of course the art work's concept) may have a bit too much in terms of its symbolism than what the prompt can convey.

So as a result, I have streamlined the prompt, or so I think I have...

photographic tarot card borderless a fool of a woman facing the camera wearing ragged clothes and stockings without shoes with feathers in her hair, she is holding a stick in one hand, epic fantasy art concept character art intricate, beautiful lighting, by stanley artgerm lau, greg rutkowski, thomas kindkade realistic --ar 8:10 --testp --creative --s 1250
I'll generate five images and see what I get.

As it turns out, I ended up generating more than five. These aren't very representative of the image in my mind's eye, so I think this is a concept that I will just need to come back to in the future.

Should be fun to explore this theme a bit further.