Once again too
impoverished to hire a cover artist, I sallied forth with my limited
skills and helplessly left-brained brain to create a masterpiece and
came forth with, well, probably not a masterpiece.
I’ve always
liked the weird aesthetic of the old Men’s Adventure magazines, or
“sweat mags” as they were also called. They weren’t really
bondage porn but they were VERY prone to stories about Nazis, World
War II-era Japanese soldiers and other seriously evil types
tormenting scantily clad women whose only crime was beauty.
I think that aesthetic would go very well with softcore bondage porn
or even hardcore bondage porn. The raw, lurid qualities of the covers
translate well into porn. And I had a scene in my story that fit
right in with the sweat mag aesthetic, so I was all over it.
What I wanted was
a scene of prison guards and raiders shooting it out in a red-lit
room filled with smoke and naked or scantily clad screaming women in
bondage. For the record, here’s what I came up with:
But getting there was a real pain in the ass. The easy part, it
turned out, was getting the naked, scantily clad screaming women.
Usually that’s an issue with most commercial art AIs. And Leonardo
AI as usual did morphy tricks with hands, feet, breasts and whatnot,
but for some reason it wasn’t all that prudish about nudity. Au
contraire, as I explained in my
post about the Jinkie Jenkins promo cover.
To get the various
naked women in bondage I used several mostly naked Second Life
avatars and ran them through various bondage poses. I got quite a few
images, some of them pretty good, some of them unusable and most of
them kind of in the middle. I picked out three and ran them through
Leonardo AI to see if I could get them humanized. And mostly it
worked.
It worked most
spectacularly on the SL avatar that had the best expression. This
one:
I have an
attachment for my Second Life avatars that allows me to place various
expressions on their faces. The horrified and shocked look on the avatar’s face worked beautifully. But the distortion on the mouth
was too much for the SL avatar to handle. Although the expression was
approximately correct, the mouth was misshapen, ruining the whole effect.
Fortunately, when
I ran the avatar through Leonardo AI it corrected the mouth
perfectly. It also added to the shock and horror of the expression
and made the flesh more smooth and lifelike.
I also wanted a
body lying on the floor. That proved very easy, the SL avatar in a
sleeping pose worked fine. The hands were especially nice, and I was
afraid that when I ran it through Leonardo AI it would do its usual
hi-jinks with the hands. But it did not, they came out beautifully,
and the flesh came out fleshier, too.
Those hand are just exquisite. I suspect because the fingers are fully extended and roughly in parallel. Very unlike AI art to get them so right. Butt came out nice, too,
not like the pussybutts.
So we had our
picture of a dead woman. Except, in case there’s some rule against
dead women on the covers of erotica, I want it clearly understood
that the woman is not dead, she is merely pining for the fjords, as
sex slaves sometimes do.
Finally, there was
our woman hanging from the ceiling, who is of course Kim Halstead,
the protagonist of the story. Her SL avatar was problematical. Her
feet were a mess and her torso was kind of twisty.
So I ran it
through Leonardo AI hoping for improvement and I got some. The torso
came out fine, the face and hair were more lifelike, but the feet
were still a mess and in fact her calves had some weird new bulges to
them. Also her facial expression was wrong. She was supposed to be
terrified. But the ballgag prevented her mouth from conveying her
terror, and her eyes were staring calmly at the viewer and her brows
were relaxed, giving her more of a "What’s-all-this-then?" expression. Which works in some cases of women wearing ballgags but
not this one. So I had to go in there and use my vaunted artistic
skills to make her look horrified.
The torso on this Leonardo AI output doesn't look twisty, but the feet are still a mess and there are all sorts of strange lumps on her calves that weren't there before. Plus, her expression is what art directors call "All Wrong."
Leonardo doesn't "get" ballgags at all. So I got a few like this. But at least the horrible ballgag and mouth distract from what's going on with the hands.
This is the best result I got from Leonardo AI. The fingers are dodgy and the she doesn't look terrified or horrified, just... concerned.
New and improved! I didn't spot the issue with the expression until I already had the background art and a lot of the smoke laid in, plus I'd altered the darkness of the image to fit in more with the "smoke-filled room" atmosphere. That's why the image is so much darker than the others. I erased portions of the old eyebrows, drew in new ones, widened the eyes and put in a little drool from the ballgag for good measure. (Also it subtly makes her look more helpless and out of control.) And I lopped off an extra finger or three that were on the original.
With my naked
women quota fulfilled, I needed the background art, the room in which
the gunfight was being held, filled with smoke
and lit by red lights.
Generally,
Leonardo AI and other art AIs don’t do well with crowds and people
shooting guns. I would much rather have gone to Deposit Photos and
used it for background art. But Deposit Photos (and most other image
services) generally are weak on images of gunfights inside a room or
a building. There are lots of images of soldiers fighting in the
outdoors, but very few interior shots.
So it was back to
Leonardo AI. And it is better than Deposit Photos about giving you
soldiers fighting in a room. The problem was that the soldiers often
pointed their guns at their allies, rather than the enemy. And they
sometimes did not hold the guns properly. The guns also tended to
morph and generally look sus. I had wanted an image of two groups of
men firing guns at one another with screaming naked women caught in
the crossfire.
But what I wound
up settling for was one group of men carrying guns and running toward
the viewer. Only one of them was pointing his gun at an ally! Then I placed the naked women screaming in the
foreground.
And the thing I
had to tie it all together with was smoke. Yeah, that red smoke
covers up a lot of sins, and I’m not just talking about Kim’s
nipples and genitals. I’m also talking about those ugly feet and
calves. And the screaming woman’s breasts. And her hands. Smoke is
my new favorite cover art element!
OK, not EXACTLY what I wanted, but there ARE soldiers in a room.
OK, SOMEBODY'S about to get shot. Just not any identifiable enemies. This happened a LOT.
After all this work I wound up with a
cover that was a lot closer to my original intent than I expected.
Was it as good as I would have gotten if I’d hired a decent cover
artist? Of course not. But I do like it. It does have that sweat mag
cover feel to it. Will readers like it, too? I guess we’ll find
out…
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