Gun Bullet Thunder Sword Coffee Art!

Yesterday I created this promo art as I was sipping my Gun Bullet Thunder Sword coffee. (It's just coffee with a tablespoon of butter emulsified into it, instead of/in addition to milk. The keto guys started drinking it and I guess the term "butter coffee" wasn't macho enough for them, so they renamed it "bulletproof coffee" which I'll grant you does have Rule of Cool written all over it. So I decided to go one better and take the macho to the max with Thunder Sword Hot Pussy Bullet coffee. Take that, "butter coffee"!) 

Anyway came up with this promo piece for Erotic Slavegirls of Outer Space and really liked it. I started out by getting some images of a raging battle in outer space between 1950s style pulp spaceships.to go with the B-movie ambience of the novel, using a Civitai text prompt. No naked women involved so I figured it would be easy. But Civitai fought me anyway. The spaceships are more 1980s style spacecraft, heavily influenced by Star Wars. I could live with that, but for some reason Civitai just HAD to introduce planetscapes or moonscapes into the image, couldn't just go with "spaceships fighting in outer space with planets and stars in the background" which was pretty much my prompt. Still, the images were dramatic, space-fighty and outer-spacey in general, so I went with it. 

After looking at all the images I'd gotten (about eight usable ones) I looked at various slavegirl images I had created on Civitai, generally via Image to Image using an SL avatar, looking for something that would work well with the outerspace images. I settled on the one seen above, because the position of her arms and legs splayed out in different directions paralleled the ravening bolts of doom fired by the spaceships, and the spaceships themselves. 

I knocked out the slavegirl's background using Deposit Photos' free background knockout service which tends to do a better job than the AI art background knockout options (thanks, Deposit Photos!) and then pulled up both images in GIMP. I placed the image of the slavegirl on a layer atop the space battle image base, shrank the slavegirl to fit, and then used the layer opacity slider to get her transparent enough that she matched the background image visually. This left her so transparent that planets, spaceships and ravening bolts of doom were clearly visible through her. I thought it was a nice effect, so I left it as is. 

Came out pretty well, I thought. Enjoy!

About That Cover Art For The Prison Bitch Trilogy...

Vagina trouble!

Image source: Cover art by me, from a custom Second Life avatar run through Leonardo.

Leonardo AI can be such a damned tease. I ran this pretty good Second Life avatar through it:

Tanned Second Life bikini babe wearing the tiniest microthong evah!

The Leonardo avatar I got was just gorgeous. But I guess that tiny little microthong on the Second Life avatar defeated Leonardo and it screwed up the image. It ended the thong somewhere on the avatar's happy trail rather than over it's pussy. (Leonardo did get one image right: it put the tiny microthong where it belonged, half-buried in the Leonardo image's pussy.  But even then, Smashwords is allergic to pussies. No tiniest vaguest bit of what might be a vagina can appear on a Smashwords cover. I've been dinged for it before. No visible genitalia, even for hardcore taboo erotica.

So I went with the Leonardo AI that had the best other features, which was the one above. Its interpretation of the pasties on the SL avatar was brilliant. The image had the sleek, tanned blonde look of a beach party girl. So  I tried to make the thong work. But it was incredibly difficult because I went at it in the stupidest possible way. (I blame GIMP!) I wanted to just widen and extend the thong bottom so that it just barely covered the entire vagina instead of ending somewhere in the woman's happy trail region, leaving her pussy, such as it was, exposed.

All I really needed to do was cut and paste some pieces of the existing thong to get the shape I needed to pass Smashwords muster. That proved problematical however. The problem was that the bottom of the image's crotch was wide and distant from the top of the thong, and needed a lot of stretching and reshaping to reach where it needed to, and it had to follow natural lines from the top of the thong. The basic problem was my conception of the thong was all wrong, so I kept creating weirdly shaped thongs.

I finally decided my problem was the piece-by-piece approach, so I used GIMP's Cage Transform tool to create a thong that covered what it needed to. It seemed so plausible: you drew a cage outlining the object you want to change, with points set along the lines of the cage. When you grab a point and move it, the image changes to conform to the new outline of the cage. It seems like just the thing to create a thong that covered what it needed to.

Disembodied thong. A shame it went wrong!

This proved to be wrong. I created a layer that was just the thong itself, pasted it into a layer above the base image, and attempted to adjust the thong's dimensions. I had imagined moving the cage would keep the shapes being moved the same, and that the distance I moved the cage element would determine how much the image distorted. This turned out not to be true. Using the cage tool was very much like using the smudge tool. The smudge tool is a tool that will be very familiar to pastelists (people who create art with pastel sticks, not people who paste lists). It allows you to mix colors together by smudging them together with the tool, much as a pastel or charcoal artist smudges their chalk with his finger to mix it with nearby chalks. It's  great tool, I use it often.

But what I got when I used the cage tool was a smudged, lumpy outline of the thong instead of the smooth-edged garment. And because the amount of distance the thong distorted did not match the amount of distance the cage points were dragged, it was verr hard to get the thong parts moved to where they needed to be. And of course when the cage points were dragged, the edges of the image were smudged as well as moved. So instead of an enlarged, differently-shaped thong I got a fuzzy, blobby approximation of the thong. After some obvious failures, I dumped the cage transform tool.

But a good thing did come out of it. One of the fuzzy thong outlines I got from the cage transform tool was shaped like a breech cloth instead of a thong. It looked like it was hanging loose between her legs instead of tucked between them. And I realized that that was a lot easier to build using cut and past, so I did that. And it looked even sexier than a thong that covered her entire pussy area, because it looked like it was hanging loose which meant her pussy was just hanging out there behind the breech cloth. The slightest breeze might flip the cloth aside revealing her pussy. Much sexier.

If you want an example of the way the smudge tool works when you've got the right task for it, notice that the image I worked with has transformed the ballgag in the Second Life Avatar's mouth into mouth hooks, or something like them. But the image on the cover wears a ballgag. What happened there was that one of the Leonardo AIs came out with a pretty good ballgag so I lopped off her head and shoulders and transplanted them to the one I used. I pasted the head into a layer over the base and fiddled with the color values and then merged it down with the other layer. There was a faint line where the shoulders were on top of the base because the colors did not exactly match. But I just took the smudge tool and mixed those colors together and now you absolutely cannot tell that the head on the cover is a transplant. No one would have ever known if I had not told everyone right here on this post. Handy thing, that smudge tool.

 But what about the fully dressed Kim Halstead?

A modern professional woman, you betcha, courtesy of Leonardo AI.

My initial plan for finance banker Kim was to pick up an image from Deposit Photos. I knew they had tons of images of women in business suits, and tons of women with sexy bodies. So it seemed likely that they would have images of women with sexy bodies in business suits. I mean, c'mon.

Turns out I was wrong. There is a great gulf fixed between the bodies of women in business attire and women in bikinis, underwear or nothing. Sexy women often have curvy bodies. Business women are almost all thin and not curvy. Actually, among the ones I checked, "almost" is not required: none of them were curvy.

So I went back to Leonardo AI and did a text prompt to get the image above. It was easy, almost ridiculously so. The woman was clothed and not having sex and not doing anything  that could be interpreted as having sex or being sexy, she was just standing there being bankerish. No censorship issues. I did get a certain amount of images of women who were not curvy, and images of women who looked overweight by not curvy. But I also got a certain amount of curvy women in business suits. Didn't take long at all.

And as a result I got banker Kim standing next to naked and gagged and bound Kim, who is also standing.

Finally, for the foreground I reused my Princess Gaia image from the cover of the book.

Love that pissed-off expression.

This time I used more of her body, but still left out the guy who's fucking her doggie style because of course that wouldn't fly for a book cover. I also had to emblonden her hair (just a matter of color cycling her hair and then pasting it in over her brown hair), since this is supposed to be another version of Kim, who is blond. The idea is to represent Kim as Banker Kim, Sexy Kim, and Fucked, Bound and Gagged Kim as she sinks into the pit of depravity that is Club Rape. 

The prison with all the guards is leftover from my Club Rape cover. I made quite a few background images for that one, most of them unusable for that cover, but this one worked out well for this cover. What I liked about it was the cool colors, because it added depth to the image. Gaia/Kim in the foreground is in far warmer colors than the figures of Banker Kim and Naked Kim behind her, who were in much warmer colors than the guards and prison behind them.

Here's the cover all put together:

Go ahead and buy the book, I'm a much better writer than I am an artist. Just click on this text to go to Smashwords.

And here's what's happening to Gaia/Kim on the cover, just so you know:

Ain't it always the way?

Leonardo AI Surprise Video, Deposit Photo AI

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Now, About That Cover For the Pet Shop Girls Trilogy -- Leonardo AI Hits And Misses

 
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! 

Another Winner From Kling AI With A Different Model From Second Life Via Leonardo AI

Decided to create a new promo vid for Sex and Submission with a different model. As usual we start with a Second Life avatar. This one is nicely done, some very good skin tones but the strap bikini she wears is clumsily done with some fairly jagged edges on what should be smooth curved lines. Also, a bit of nipple visible on her right breast and something that could be considered pubic hair inside the lower buckle on her bikini bottom straps.(Smashwords doesn't even want Attempted Pubic Hair!)

Ran it through Leonardo and got a much improved face and the bikini straps are much improved. Everything is much improved! She looks a little Asian, but that's OK. Plus bye-bye to Attempted Pubic Hair worries. Pasted it in front of background art from Deposit Photos.

I ran it through Leonardo Motion just to see what I'd get. The result would speak for itself, if it had a mouth. But it would probably just scream.

Ran the same image through Kling AI with a prompt of "A beautiful woman dances alone on a stage." Did not want to get too explicit with the prompt! Still got a very nice result, except, for just a moment there she had no face. I hate when that happens to women when they're dancing.

Ran a slightly different image through Kling AI and success at last! Ok, for a moment there her neck gets a little rubbery, but c'mon, rubbernecking is a thing! Off to promote my book!

Motion Video Success With Kling

Ta-da! Practically my first motion video using Kling's Image to Video program. Notice the lack of bulbous hands as in Leonardo AI! Notice the lack of bulbous bodies (also an unfortunate Leonardo AI feature, see my post about it here.} The very nice exception being Zindra's very bulbous breasts bouncing boobily along. And notice that the Zindra figure looks EVEN BETTER than the original Zindra art!

Of course there had to be a surprise for me courtesy of Kling AI as I attempted to make videos promoting my new novel Sword and Submission, and the more observant among you will have noticed it: the bearded lady smirking in the background when Zindra drops. There were no bearded ladies in the original image. Thanks, Kling. I wound up generating several videos to get what I wanted, and some of the ones I didn't use were usable. And most generated cover art. Here's the image I chose: 

This was the image I made from one of the videos, I'm not sure exactly which one. Doesn' matter. The main reason I picked the image is that Kling had Zindra's eye tracking King Horth instead of staring at the viewer as in my original art. A far cry from the original Second Life avatar though the Leonardo AI image was pretty damn good. I also ran the final image through Deposit Photo's free Upscaler program as it was a little short on pixels for ebook cover art. Upscaler got me all the pixels I needed and kept the image crisp and sharp. So many tools, working so well. It's a new day for video. 

I did get one video that was even better than I could have hoped. You of course can never ask for sex acts in a prompt on a commercial AI. But you can sometimes get some very suggestive results. Like this one:

I'm calling it. This is a straight-up R-rated blowjob scene. Woo-hoo! I just asked for a woman kneeling as in all the other video prompts. I got this. Nice!

I'll probably see if I can get away with using it. But for starters I have another video that came out pretty damn good. This one:

This one is stronger than the others in that the motion is completed instead of stopping in mid-motion. Also, stops on a great pose for Zindra, her face highlighted beautifully, and look how good those prayerful hands look. This will be my starter video. I'll be using Leonardo for still images because Kling AI doesn't give you a lot of videos for your eight bucks a month.

Why I Had To Kneecap The Promo Video for My New Novelette "Butterfly" (Capitalism Is The Villain)

 OK, so I created a new promo video for my upcoming novelette (we're talking Labor Day!) "Butterfly." Here is the original video I shot, with the music I originally used:

Pretty cool, eh? I think so. Went beyond my expectations for such a simple video. There was just one problem: the music is owned by the band Swingrowers, and copyright issues being what they are, I couldn't use the video as is. I had to kneecap it, strictly for legal reasons. (Here's a link to the original Swingrowers song, it's great, definitely check it out.) I went through Microsoft's catalog of public domain music for videos on its video player, and it was a HORRIBLE experience. The Microsoft public  domain stuff  was the sort of thing you might hear in an elevator going to hell. I finally chose the least bad of the options because I didn't have weeks to spend looking for something good in the public domain. (And because there was a very good chance that there was nothing good for my purposes anywhere in the public domain.)

And I came up with this video:

It's not nearly the video that my original was. The public domain music is barely tolerable, and it was FAR better than the rest. And that cheeses me off. Because I feel that my video of the naked dancing fairy added value to the song. It created something different and new that people might enjoy.  I finally wound up having to link to the Swingrowers videos (same link seen earlier in this post) and  recommending that viewers play the video at no volume while listening to the Youtube video. Which works after a fashion, but jeeze, what a kludge.

Of course having created the song "Butterfly" Swingrowers has every right to profit from it. And I have no right to profit from it. And I'm not profiting from it. The most you can say is that the video might have eventually led people to my book site, but let's face it, nobody buys a book because of the music that accompanied a promotional video for it. Or to put it in financial terms, if there was a way to fairly compensate Swingrowers for every sale of my book that was based on the fact that people liked their song in my promo video, I might at the end of the year owe then a nickel. Or not.

Of course the Swingrowers could give permission for me to run my video with their music for free. But that isn't the way capitalism works, is it? Capitalism works to make it very difficult for people to get permission to use music, and very easy to pay royalties to companies to use music if you've got lots of money. In fact, capitalism creates enforcement arms to track down people who use music/art without permission (think RIAA). And those royalties are expensive! Here is a link showing what an expensive, pain in the ass process it is to license a song, particularly a popular song.

At the very least  you might think there could be an easy, cheap alternative way to get good music for videos, etc., that aren't making money. There is not. You can make a cover of a popular song if you're a musician, and you won't owe anybody a penny, so long as you clearly credit the originators of the song you are covering. But I am not a cover band. I am a self-published erotica writer, and the message we self-published erotica writers get from the music industry (as well as the publishing industry, a lot of other industries and the government, frankly) is a loud and enthusiastic "FUCK OFF!"

Contrast that with the art industry. There are all sorts of ways of obtaining  permission to use art for commercial use, some of them affordable even to low-lifes like me. As I've said, I use Depositphotos.com art for my book covers all the time. They have a huge selection of artwork and you can buy commercial rights to use them even when your sales are as low as mine. Frankly, you could afford to use Depositphotos.com stuff on a hobbyist's budget. And DepositPhotos.com is not the only organization out there that distributes art at reasonable prices. It has several competitors.

The reason Internet has affordable artwork for publishers is a matter of the way the industry works. Photographers take many photos in a commercial shoot but only a tiny fraction of them get bought by the customer. Most of the unsold images just go into the photographer's portfolio. When commercial sites started offering art to customers on a pay-per-use basis, it didn't take photographers and artists long to realize that if they dumped the contents of their portfolios on said sites, they might actually make money off some of those unused photos after all. Not nearly as much as they normally did, perhaps, but so what? They weren't making ANY money off the images before that. The photographer makes money off of the images he couldn't sell the client, the distributor gets a wide selection of photos to offer to customers (and takes a cut off each sale, I presume) and marginal publishers or self-publishers get a lot of great photos and artwork to use for their covers at reasonable prices. Win-win-win! 

(I assume that the exact same logic applies for commercial art as well, which is why DepositPhotos and others have so much good art in their inventories.)

There are also distributors of free public domain images out there. Most of the legit ones tend to have very small or very outdated selections of images. There are some with large selections of public domain images out there, but publisher beware: a couple of the public domain sites I've browsed have had images that clearly were NOT legally allowable for commercial use. For example, on one such site I found a very nice vector graphic of the Enterprise from Star Trek, very realistic right down to the NCC-1701 on the hull. I'm pretty sure nobody at Paramount Studios authorized that artwork for public domain use. And even if the artwork was created by an artist not associated with Paramount Studios, I'm pretty sure Paramount has the Enterprises' image trademarked.

So copyright works pretty well in the art world, but not at all well in the music world. It prevents creators from creating original works that people might enjoy.  And that's a damned shame. I'm glad there's no barriers like that in book publishing (there certainly used to be). It was a much sadder and sorrier profession when the big publishers were able to gatekeep all but a select few out of the industry.

Like the music business is now.