"Easy" Cover Redo

I had the semi-brilliant idea to run some of my old cover art through Civitai to see if I could get some easy book cover upgrades going. Many of my early and middle period book covers were created with Second Life avatars, and it shows. AI can give a smoother, creamier, richer appearance than Second Life avatars and art. BTW, the brown circle thing they're in is a Second Life bronze collar, with lots of dangly chains. It looked so much better around a neck. So I ran the base art through Civitai and here's what I got:

Well hell to the yes on this image. Granted, there were a few issues, but overall, dayum. Great looking art. The redheads were transformed to brunettes but I loved their faces and their bodies were dynamite. It was nice of Civitai to give the avatars legs. Civitai was also very generous with fingers for their images. There was also the problem that I wanted one of them to look alarmed and one to look welcoming. (The book is about a woman who is both attracted to the prospect of being collared and dreading it as well, hence two identical woman with different expressions.) Clearly I had my work cut out for me.

After several iterations on Civitai, I discovered that the system simply could not or would not parse the prompt asking for one woman to look frightened and the other to look friendly. It could, however get two women to both look friendly, or both look frightened. And since I had created several iterations in the process of finding this out, I had plenty of pics of two woman scowling and of two women smiling. Time for a face transplant! That would give me my smile and cover up the mangled face on the base art. I chose the artwork above for my base because it was the one that had the hand raised in the same pose as the original. Granted, that hand had too many fingers. Then again, the hand on the other woman's hip had even more extra fingers. And then there's the other other hand extending beyond her hip for no apparent reason. And finally the little knot or shield or jewelry, while PERFECT in my view, would not work for an erotica book cover. Genitals must not only be hidden, but very obviously hidden, so that no one will ever suspect that women have vaginas. I had my work cut out for me. But look what I got when I was through:

Ta-da! Just compare this art with the original cover art. Huge difference. Granted it took hours to get to this point. The face transplant was, ironically, the easiest thing to do. All that hair hides a multitude of sins. Much more difficult was the multifingered hand on the waist. I had to do a hip transplant from another iteration to cover the hand, then tediously rework the art to make the hand extending beyond the the hip disappear. I also had to do tedious reworking to make the woman's arm properly appear to be behind her back. And reworking the raised hand to make it look less obviously wrong was also tedious. It still looks kind of wrong but fixing that would involve redrawing her hand and I wasn't up for that, since it would have been even more tredious. Creating a tiny black thong patch to make the women on the left's pussy very obviously covered was much more of a quick and easy job. The secret of women having vaginas on book covers remains safe!

So my easy book cover took... hours. Like, most of the day. Sigh. If you want to read the story itself, and it's one of my most popular books, you can check it out here.