Man & Machine: Log 2

I’m a little over the halfway mark with 18 designs down. I’m really excited about the coming week’s designs because I get to dust some of these ideas off from my sketchbooks.

Updates:

• New brush I’m testing (Vinyl) really speaks to my way of painting by shape and asymmetry

• Noticed a subconscious urge to include elements of magic, armour and tech as relics

• Creating character sections ahead of time made storytelling smoother overall (less writer’s block)

• Machina Maiden came out as my favourite design this week + drawing grass is therapeutic

• Heartbeast and Octolord have intriguing stories worth developing

• I see resemblance in some of these characters from my sketchbooks ~2020

My sketches for the 2nd week of characters

DALL·E & I

I decided to subscribe to ChatGPT, because it’s not free without limitations.

The good:

• Visual generation is a lot faster, and more accurate than Stable Diffusion (free)

• It asks deeper questions and provided text-based variants to finalise my character design before visual generation

• While the details in my sketches are loose, DALL·E is proactive in refining details by providing options to get an idea of what’s possible. A great example of this is Octolord’s runic symbols and bio-armour, I left it as scribbles but it came out as symmetrical patterns

The bad:

• The AI seems to have a stereotyped idea of how my character should look, giving it a predictably-safe, vanilla look (eg: how Heartbeast looks with the human proportions vs my drawing with its unorthodox anatomy)

• Text is illegible, looks like symbols at times

• Organic details (fingers, muscles or tentacles) are either over-exaggerated or disproportional (6 fingers, non-existing muscle groups), especially when different limbs overlap one another

DALL·E’s interpretation of my work based on text generated by ChatGPT + my notes

What to expect for Week 3

• Midjourney

• Refined stylistic approach

• Old character exploration