Here's the cover of "The Pet Shop Girls Trilogy," for reference. Click on it to get the book!
I knew what I wanted when I stared out making the cover for TPSGT (The Pet Shop Girls Trilogy). I had three slavegirls featured in my stories and I wanted images of the three of them looking sexy and naked on the cover. So I went to the folders where I built the covers of the three novels that make up TPSGT and looked for images I could use. The images all started out as Second Live avatars, here they are, for the record:
The Second Live avatar that Katie was based on.
The Second Life avatar Nataly was based on.
The Second Live avatar Susan was based on. Note the ropes. They're supposed to be a rope bondage version of a bitch suit, but they didn't really work.
Here are the three Leonardo AI images I was able to create using the avatars:
Here's Katie all AI'd up, and damn what an improvement. I ran quite a few iterations to get this image, and I'm so glad I stuck with it. I love the result here, especially that beaming smile. The face in general is a huge improvement. And the breasts are very nice indeed, mostly because of that smooth honey brown skin she has. I was glad to have a person of color because the other two characters were very Caucasian-looking and I had no problem at all with Katie being brown. Hell yes!
Nataly didn't change much except she got a lot more human looking and a lot less cartoonish-looking. Her ugly, lumpy shoulders got smoothed out. Her skin and hair improved. The only problem area was the ballgag. It didn't come out right on ANY of my iterations. (This image is Photoshopped. I drew a circle around the confused ballgag parts and borrowed the ballgag from a porn photo and then did some tedious editing to get it just right.)
Nataly's Leonardo AI version was incredible. Most especially that facial expression. Leonardo took the apprehensive expression on the SL avatar and converted to a lost, haunted expression. Her eyes are incredibly expressive. Even MORE amazing, the collar came out OK and the ballgag improved! Almost always, Leonardo AI will fuck up ballgags big time, and they almost always turn a collar into a necklace that looks nothing like the collar. Also, the tail is much improved, with the color and texture matching Susan's hair. And even the shape of the tail was much improved. Only problem was the ropes, which Leonardo AI interpreted as lacy, frilly woman things. I can't even blame Leonardo for that. The ropes on the SL avatar are not especially well done, a weakness of SL physics. I thought about hand drawing ropes but I wound up saying the words that so many artists have: "Fuck it. It'll do." I mean, yeah, she does appear to have lace growing out of one armpit, but whachagonnado? (That's why you need real artists if you can afford them, boys and girls. When they say "fuck it!" it's over something a non-artist would not notice.)
Next I needed something to tie the three images together visually. My first track was, since they were Pet Shop slavegirls, they could be posing in a Pet Shop window, trying to get people to buy them. I went to Deposit Photos to see if they had any Pet Store art I could use, but amazingly, the Pet Store art was about dogs and cats and stuff. Also a lot of it was vector art. I gave up after a while. I couldn't find anything I could use so after a while I stopped looking and went to my backup plan.
Fortunately I had a backup plan, which was to use prompts to create a Pet Store exterior with display window filled with nothing (so I could paste in the girls). Unfortunately, I had a bright idea for that, which was to have a neon sign over or in the windows with the words "Please Buy Me!" glowing.
This was when I discovered how many ways there were to misspell "Please Buy Me." I had naively thought that by including the text I wanted in my prompt, the AI would use those exact letters to represent the word, "Please Buy Me." But noooooooo, instead I got every last possible misspelling of "Please Buy Me." "Pelase Buy Me" was the favorite, but also "Plase By Me," "Peals Buy Me" and ";!Ple::s Be Me." Maybe about 1 in 10 iterations had the right spelling.
There were other problems as well. I asked for an empty display space behind the window. (I did not ask for "no dogs and cats" as a negative prompt because I knew from past experience that this would only encourage Leonardo AI to give me lots of images of dogs and cats.) So I still got lots of images of dogs and cats in the "empty" display space, also people, food bowls, all kinds of pet products on shelves, and occasionally, an empty space. I went through many iterations and eventually got several images of pet shop windows with empty, or at least, mostly empty, spaces behind them that were usable.
Then I went to work pasting in the Pet Girls and that's when I ran into a more difficult problem, perspective. The AI had provided me with images of people looking in the window (because I asked for it in the prompt). They worked for my intent but there was a perspective problem. I want the images of the Pet Girls to be large, dominating the page, because I know my horny, horny readership. But the people in the foreground set the perspective, and if I made my images large they would look like giantesses. If I made them small enough to look normal next to the onlookers they would be tiny indeed, problematical since book covers are vertical spaces.
Yeah, a really sad image that just doesn't work.
I tried arranging the Pet Girls in many configurations in several Pet Shop windows, and none of them worked. In addition to the perspective issue, there was a layering issue. I could paste the images into the window space, but there was no easy way to make them look like they were behind glass and have them dominate the page. And if it wasn't easy I wasn't about to try it! I had deadlines, dammit! So I gave up the Pet Shop window idea and did some seriously lateral thinking.
I decided to just display the three images in a generic kind of space, no window or shoppers. I soon realized that I would need some kind of background art to make the space behind the Pet Girls something other than dead space. So I thought about the kind of images you might find in a place where Pet Girls are sold. If I had been more imaginative, and had more time, I could have come up with some fairly imaginative ideas, like maybe pet girls jumping through hoops or kneeling before owners with their butts stuck out.
But I didn't have the time, I just focussed generically sexy images that might look right as the background of a human Pet Shop. And eventually I had an idea: the image most people think of as belonging in a place where very sexy things are done is a nude silhouette of a woman in a sexy pose. Lots of TV shows and movies have used this kind of art as a sign of a sexy business.
This time I made no attempt to get the images I wanted via Leonardo AI. It fights sexy imagery hard. After writing this image I went to Leonardo AI and created images using this prompt: "A series of silhouettes of women in bikinis looking beautiful." Here's what I got:
Yeah, "silhouette" is another word Leonardo AI clearly does not understand. Also it whiffed on the word "series." I was right, getting what I wanted from Leonardo AI would have been a bear.
So I went to Deposit Photos looking for my silhouettes and there I struck gold. They had exactly what I needed, plenty of it. I did a bit of shopping and picked a series of images that had a lot of submissive-looking poses. They were all black and white silhouettes, and I didnt want that, it would be too strong, not at all what I needed. But I knew how to fix that, I just put a golden-brown (emphasis on the "golden") layer over the silhouettes and worked the opacity of both layers until I had what I wanted. You can see it in the background of the cover art. Worked very nicely I think.
The only other element of the cover is that Katie is riding Susan. This was just a matter of cutting and pasting multiple layers of Katie on trop of Susan. It was tedious, time-consuming work but not difficult other than that, mainly because Susan and Katie's poses worked very well for a horsie ride.
That's the full story of that "easy" cover. It took a long time for me to get it finished and looking something like "right." Someday I will make enough money to hire and artist and pay them a decent price for their work. Until then, I'll continue to put huge effort into creating mediocre cover art!
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