ChatGPT Enhancements

I was sitting around gloomily contemplating the fact that I had filled my limits on Grok for the day, when it suddenly occurred to me that I had a subscription to ChatGPT that I hadn't been using to its full potential, and a plethora of unused pictures. So I gathered up a few and enhanced them. Eventually I will animate them, but I think they turned out quite well as they are. Ar-Pharazon and Annatar conspire again; there is a Blue Wizard (probably not one from Middle-earth); a Dragon Attacks from above; Gandalf vs. The Balrog; Merlin and Arthur; Odin One-Eye; an alien is Puzzled by an encounter with a human; and an elf sings of the Region of the Summer Stars (which poem see elsewhere in this blog).

Draw Three More

If I remember rightly, with the 'Man of Ice' this completes the 'Man Of' set. There were five Dwarves, including the Yellow Dwarf and the Green Dwarf, and Five Dragons of colors corresponding to the Dwarves' colors. Many other sets, including the Four Winds, etc. The cards were the size of an ordinary playing card, which explains why many were simplified in drawing.

Back to the ABC's

Uncle Analdas is from Robert Lawson's Rabbit Hill books. The AI insists on giving Mole in Badger and Mole a tail. A maiden hovers Between Worlds while brutes try to drag her in. I give Brockhouse another shot; Canis Rex celebrates Christmas with the help of his friend, Friar Pork. The dragons in Castle Dragon were a total artifact of the AI; I gave in and just changed the title. The devil plays a Cat Piano. Rosemary Brown attempts to free her friend Carbonel using the Cauldron. A wizard enters a Cave Mouth. A dark fortress looms over the Chasm (the boat is another artifact the AI insists making a star); Elf and Bear toast one another.

All For A Lark

I thought for a lark I'd turn some of Nanny's art into photorealitic images. In the last one the AI interpreted Nanny's seaplane as three old boats. I added a seaplane. "I had to give them a horn they could see!" It also interpreted some of her whiter mountains as clouds.

Your Genial Host

I did not ask to be given nimbus; that was purely an artifact of the AI, and after many iterations I was too tired to correct it. It shows me hosting a dinner with 'my' creations, a la Leonardo's The Last Supper. Besides Bear, Roth, John Kraft, Maggie (seated next to me), and the Willowy Witch and Mr. Samuel Frobisher seated at the end of the table, there are also Brenda Mae Mercy, A. I. Al, Pepper Street, and Prince Brynne, rather recent creations that have engaged me lately. In a sense I am their host in that they derive whatever sort of life they have from me, parasites or partial avatars, if you will. My brother John had an almost equal hand in creating Roth and John Kraft; the rest are all my sole responsibility.

In the Cards

In middle school, I started working on a card game that I called simply Sets, drawing groups of fantasy characters on cardboard cards I cut out myself. I think the Red Dwarf was the first I ever drew. The quality kind of declined as I began desperately trying to finish it up (I never did). A little while ago I made photocopy groups of some of them. I lost track of those until my brother John sent me some files he had. I decided to make a selected few enhancements and animations of them. Here they are.

The dwarves are very ... dwarfish, aren't they?

Tolkien Tuesday: Always Look On the Dark Side of Life

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway." — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

And, of course, ugly is easier to draw than beautiful. You should remember that I was drawing stuff from The Silmarillion only about three of four years after it was published. There was not a lot of iconography around to help me visualze. Morgoth was like Sauron, Ungoliant like Shelob, Utumno like the Dark Tower. Orc Band started out as just an effort to draw variants of Orcs. In the book the Watcher in the Water was only a mass of tentacles; in my original picture I had a knobbly lump to suggest a head as a point of focus. The mouth is an artifact of the enhancement.