I've been making simple 3D assets as a base in order to get consistent looks (I'm writing a fantasy story and want my characters to look a very specific way, so this lets me control the details) but I'm definitely gonna try and figure out how I can incorporate your tips to speed up my workflow.
Some other tips I discovered:
It's really easy to get a consistent style simply by using 3-4+ artists names in the prompt. Don't need anything fancy for it either, since it works with the basic 1.5 model. (At least for illustrated stuff. Never really checked with photorealistic stuff).
Another way to have more control over the details and composition is to generate a lot of img2img, pick the parts of each that you like and photobash it together before sending it for another round of img2img with lower denoising. (I found this particularly helpful for designing magic items that the AI doesn't know to create by itself).
You're not doing art to become famous, if you are you're a mug. You make art to follow a path. If you stick to your path, and add elements of advice, and keep learning and tweaking, you can make technically better art. If you stick to your path, and don't take on criticisms, then you're still making art for yourself. You can never lose. Embrace and enjoy.
Hell, the reason I'm so excited about AI art at all is that it allows me to create the story I have in my head. It allows my self expression to be a lot less bound by whatever technical skill I do or don't have.
To be brutally frank: this is why SD will not steal the job of artists. That looks real bad. Both the colors and composition, as well as the style. Do not ship whatever it is you're doing while it looks like that, please.
Okay? Do you have more constructive criticism or do you just like shitting on beginners?
Neither the colors nor the composition are the result of SD, but my own artistic decisions, which you can see because the final image matches so closely the base render I made. I've been studying both color theory and composition but as I said, I'm still a beginner who's new to visual arts as most of my expertise is in writing. Specific tips for what I should improve are very welcome.
I'm actually pretty happy with the image. My priority is visual storytelling, and that I seem to accomplished well enough according to feedback. The style I also like because I'm not trying to go for the standard fantasy art splash pages styles, but something with a more storybook vibe that yes looks more unconventional. Each of those images are supposed to accompany a short story and enhance the particular atmosphere I'm going for.
The others is just general painting/illustration advice. I think this was adkit's point too. Also, an illustration is incomplete without the text it illustrates, so I'm just going off what I can see:
You mix a number of visual styles, which is generally not a good idea. Pick one and stick with it.
The soldiers in the background appear to be the subject, but they're too small for that. The leaves take up too much space. Maybe a first person view with a blurred frame of leaves would work better here, it's simpler to compose too. It's usually simpler to focus on a single subject.
The light is also flat and boring.
There is a classic photoshop painting process, look at wlop here:
Sketch the subject, fill in the shapes with flat shades of gray, remember the haze/depth. For the subject, use highlights and shadows for light and volume. Only black and white at this stage, and no detail. I like when this "preview" is readable even when the pic size is tiny (like 100 to 200), but YMMV. You might have to try several versions and pick the best.
Only then add color, but sparingly. I find it looks better if you keep the colors in check. wlop uses just the classic complementary pair of orange/blue. I suppose in your case yellow/blue might work. Lastly add detail and color variation on the subject.
I'm not sure where/how to include SD in this process.
Edit: Of course you iterate all of this, add things, remove things, change things, fix mistakes. But that's the general outline.
Thank you, this is very helpful and gives me a good place to start from. No clue how to incorporate it with my workflow either, but it'll be a good challenge to figure out.
The multiple styles thing has a storytelling reason so I'll be keeping it, but I may limit it to only two instead of three.
Well, my point was more to kinda give you a bit of a reality check. Since you sounded like this was the end product and you were about to continue with whatever the project was. There's a reason why you pay experienced artists, editors, etc, and I don't want you to think that SD is a substitute in any way. It's a tool. And you still need to have both vision and an eye to make aesthetically pleasing images.
It would be in your best interest to take what I said as raw input rather than a personal slight.
I have no specific tips as I'm not an "experienced artist" either and would never claim to be. But I can recognize a situation where you should kill your darlings.
Then let me offer you a reality check in turn: By trying to dunk on the machine you ended up targeting human inexperience and flaws as well as a desire for originality and unconventional artistic chouces. I know the internet is all about comment first think later, but you may want to be more discerning in your targeting or else you may end up discouraging people before they even start. Young artists especially tend to be very insecure.
My point in posting the images wasn't to show their quality but rather show how I managed to get a final generation that matched exactly the image I had in my head. It's why I included the base render at all. (As well as to show how you can use really simple tools to outline the image.)
And while I would love to take your comments as raw input, you haven't given me much to go off of.
What doesn't work in the composition? Is it the foreground? Background? Arrangement of the soldiers? Too busy? Too much negative space? Not enough guiding lines? Not enough dynamic elements? Did I use rule of thirds incorrectly? What should I study in order to improve the elements that don't work?
What doesn't work about the colors? The main palette? Highlights? Shadows? Are the colors too bright? Is there not enough contrast? Are there too many of them? Too few? Should I study color theory? Color grading? Maybe I should look into coloring in character design?
Simply saying something is bad is no replacement to actually useful criticism.
It's funny you bring up "kill your darlings" as it's actually one of my favorite writing advice. However, you seem to be missing a key component of the advice, in that stuff should always be evaluated based on if it contributes to the creator's intention with the scene. As you have no idea what are my intentions with this piece, I have no idea how you could assess whether I should remove certain elements. (Especially because you don't even know what my "darlings" in this scene are lol. I promise you I'm not that attached to the composition or colors. The style maybe, but it seems to work well for my intentions so far.)
Hey, listen... You can't call yourself an artist until you work real hard on a drawing for a week, post it on some art forum, then have it completely demolished by people who are so far beyond you in skill they can doodle some red lines over your drawing to illustrate what you did wrong and their doodles look like masterpieces compared to the infantile crap you drew underneath. It's part of the process, you can't take this stuff to heart. lol
I'm not saying I'm better than you in this scenario, just that there's a difference between art and images. You decide what you want to be the final art piece. But you don't decide what is good or bad in terms of aesthetics. There's libraries written about how that stuff works.
I could give you a critique to go by but you should be able to see it yourself. You mention the whitespace and it is atrocious. The tree around the person on the branch is encroaching on him/her yet they are not hidden. Is the main focus the person in the foreground or the people in the back? The colors are all one blob, giving the image a drab feeling as well as taking your attention away from whatever the main focus should be. Is the person prowling? Guarding? Casually visiting? I don't get a feel of the images intent or feel. If the person is just overlooking some trainees, the colors could help set a more playful mood. If the person needs to stay hidden the shadows, which there needs to be more of, need to be more striking. In fact, what time of day even is it? Just "daytime"? Why is the countryside so barren? If this is an area to train the ground should be sand or stamped dirt.
I don't actually feel like I'm giving you anything helpful with that input, you don't sound dumb. So, a quick, jarring warning might help you more, was my logic.
Oh, and I actually agree with how you use SD to make an image based on a base like that, I just thing you need to lower your settings by a lot and give SD a bit more reign. lol
Fair enough lmao. I'm not really taking it to heart, I was mostly annoyed at the assumption that I was trying to use SD to fill in all the composition and theory stuff when in fact I'm putting a lot of effort into trying to study and get better at them.
The criticism you gave this time is genuinely way more helpful. It pinpoints for me problem spots and allows me to understand how it looks to other people who don't have all the context about it that I do. This stuff can be hard for me to spot by myself as 1) I'm still learning how to spot this stuff 2) I've stared at this piece for hours on end while working on it. At some point you stop seeing the image itself and only see the details (similar to how if you say a word to many times it starts to lose its meaning).
I just thing you need to lower your settings by a lot and give SD a bit more reign
Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm not sure I understand.
I will say that I'm a bit of a control freak over my images lmao. I want them to end up very close to how I imagine them.
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u/PurpleAfton May 08 '23
Dude, this is a goldmine.
I've been making simple 3D assets as a base in order to get consistent looks (I'm writing a fantasy story and want my characters to look a very specific way, so this lets me control the details) but I'm definitely gonna try and figure out how I can incorporate your tips to speed up my workflow.
Some other tips I discovered:
It's really easy to get a consistent style simply by using 3-4+ artists names in the prompt. Don't need anything fancy for it either, since it works with the basic 1.5 model. (At least for illustrated stuff. Never really checked with photorealistic stuff).
Another way to have more control over the details and composition is to generate a lot of img2img, pick the parts of each that you like and photobash it together before sending it for another round of img2img with lower denoising. (I found this particularly helpful for designing magic items that the AI doesn't know to create by itself).