Three armored warriors battle a ferocious monster — AI art by @CaylaCatz

CaylaCatz

I'm different. I voted for the action images over the standing still images. But I knew going in, most people would vote for the more closeup. I actually made the image because faerierealm and I were talking and she gave me a little backstory on the characters. They were introduced into the Red and Brunhilde story. To make blonde Gaelstrom look a little bit different from Brunhilde, I made her a celadon armor which I thought celadon is a soft sage green but when of the images came out with skyblue armor. Turns out celadon glaze for pottery can be green or blue. That gave me the idea that skyblue armor makes sense if you're fighting in the mountains. So using the tavern image as a starter, I came up with this. Emlyn is beginning a transition from scribe to something more. If you follow a legend to write their stories, soon enough it's not going to be enough to write the stories when you're in the middle of one.

CaylaCatz

I think so too. The orc just lost his axe. That's always a positive.

CaylaCatz

I had to cheat because it kept breaking weird. I used Photoshop to fix the angle on this one as I liked the sparks it had going. This image was a big learning curve for me because getting 2 people in the middle facing outward, direwolf coming in on the left and orc coming in on the right -- and everybody bein on the cliff and not floating off the edge -- the arrow pointing at the direwolf. The orc and Gaelstrom fairly consistently fought each other tho. But the rest, omg! I have new respect for how peple prompt multiple doing different things in the same image. Even with img-to-img, it's very challenging. For some reason, I thought it'd be easy. Part of it is I have to learn to be more precise in how I place folks in the image. It's a good learning curve tho. I had fun.

faerierealm

Yes, the first time we do anything in GIMP, we have to search it up because it's not always intuitive. But once you get used to it and remember the keyboard shortcuts, it's quite nice. And of course, it doesn't take a monthly subscription fee like Adobe! As for why we came here, we're trying to animate your image. This is the start image, and the one we made where they jump through the portal to rescue Red and Brunhilde is the end image. But Seedance 2.0 rejects the request (no idea why), and the other models are really struggling haha.

CaylaCatz

Yeah, that's what I found out too. I love the results when it works ... or even gets close to what I want ... or even somewhat close if I've tried long enough, lol. My standards start to slip, lol, if I'm not in slot machine mode (slot machine mode is when I keep rolling trying to get lucky. sighs. luckily it doesn't happen too often. I get stubborn sometimes tho. Like "Dammit! Give me what I want!")

legion

I understand, you have a lot of lore there. I also try to add story to the image. I just wanted to say that if the challenge is about armor, sending an image where the armor is 5 or 10% of the image isn't a good idea. It happened to me with the Swords Woman challenge. Do you remember the one against the giant demon in the cathedral?

faerierealm

Oh yeah, AI art does at times feel similar to gambling haha. Because if you hit the Generate button enough times, it definitely increases your odds of getting a great image! (Also, for the record, we used GIMP, which is like Photoshop but open source, to fix the sword on our rescue image. We don't consider it cheating, though! 😆)

CaylaCatz

Yeah, but I think people just like the square images. I think they're easier to see on the phone when voting for those who are not at home. I don't do the DC to win -- usually I add in a pic I already did. So if I don't already have a pic, I don't usually join unless I really really liked the theme

faerierealm

Oh, don't worry, we know exactly how hard it is to create this kind of image haha. (We eventually had to give up on the bow altogether when trying to create the rescue scene with Red and Brunhilde.) Just having multiple characters sitting around a table is one thing, but an action scene? 20x difficulty!

CaylaCatz

Yeah, I loved that movie. I remember I wrote a literature paper on it about it embodied the heroe's journey but was a heroine's perspective -- the growth, the change, the rising courage and winning the love interest which at the time a lot of women's hero story meant she was going solo for life)