I was craving a bit of colour in my life, so I went straight to the source. Colour charts and rainbow gradients did the job well for me!
Going through winter where I live can be a challenge sometimes. Lots of grey, overcast days in a row can really bring a person down.
So this past week I decided to make some colourful creations to brighten things up for myself a bit. I didn't just want a wee bit of colour here and there, I wanted COLOUR! Big globs of it, all over everything!
I wanted to use a source image, (visual prompt), to get things started, so off to Google I went.
I wanted lots of different colours, and the first thing I thought to search for was a colour chart. This is what I decided to use.
I didn't care for all the white, so I filled that in with black instead. Then I cropped the image and made it the size I wanted to create my image in.
I gave the AI a LOT of freedom to create whatever it wanted from my source image and written prompt, and ended up with all sorts of strange things. Eventually, along the way, I got sick of the plain black area that kept coming out in all my renderings, so I drew in some squiggly lines to see what might happen.
Then I continued along my merry way. Tweaking my prompt with each rendering as I found things that interested me and thought of other things to add and subtract from the evolutions. Eventually I came up with this...
"Head in the Clouds"
As I made my various renders, I found things emerging that I really liked, and then went with them. To begin with, I had no idea I was going to make a rendition of a psychedelic retro 60's poster, but as I worked along that's what I 'saw coming out', so I continued to work in that direction, changing my prompt along the way and using some of the new piX as my source images.
As you can see from the above picture, I managed to get rid of the glaring oval shape, and the AI made my hand drawn squiggly lines multi coloured and more interesting. And thanks to my ever changing written prompt, I kept the bold colours I was looking for. Just dig those groovy psychedelic colours, man!
I was quite pleased with my creation, so the neXt day I decided to continue with my colourful eXperiments. I decided to find a new starting image, so back to Google I went.
This time I Googled "colourful rainbow gradients" and settled on this image...
Actually, the original image was upside down from what you see above, but I thought it might be a good idea to flip the image and have the blue on the top instead, as I could use that as the sky.
Then it occured to me that if I was going to use that blue area as my sky, why not turn the entire thing into a sky? So I did, with a tiny dude standing on a hill enjoying his view! Just a bit of written prompt tweaking was necessary...
"Great Big Sky"
I loved my multi-coloured cloud creation, so that gave me inspiration to continue once again on my big bright journey. The neXt day I found myself once again at Google, and I went with another 'rainbow gradient' search.
I found the following "pride coloured gradients" image, (of course), that I thought was very interesting.
This time I knew eXactly what I wanted to try and create. A 'fantasy flower'. So I made my prompt reflect my wishes, told it to add some 'sparkling dew drops' and quickly ended up with this following colourful image...
"Grand Opening"
So there you have it. My three colorful creations that I made to brighten up my dreary eXistance. Oddly enough, as I was creating these, the clouds eventually broke up here, and the sun began to shine once again. I'm not saying that happened because of my colourful creations, but it probably did! ; )
Of course each image took a very different path as I was making my various renditions of each of them, and sometimes I had no idea what I was creating, while other times I knew precisely what I was doing, but thanX to the visual images I used as a starting point, each one came out delightfully full of colour for me.
I suppose what I'm trying to get across here is that you can use absolutely any image at all that interests you as a starting point, and the AI makes something wonderful out of it for you.
Interestingly enough, and I think this is actually REALLY interesting, all three images were started from the EXACT SAME WRITTEN PROMPT! That's right, the same prompt made all these images, though I confess to changing it slightly as I went along.
Of course that's a possible subject for another "X" File sometime in the future, so stay tuned!
Always my kindest regards to you,
"X"
February 16th, 2024