Alien Psytrance DJ avatar - process

So to follow up on my last blog post, I wanted to show the process I went through to get my sweet Alien DJ avatar.

I started by asking DALL-E to show me an alien dj and got a few different options:

I decided to work with the third one mostly because I liked the hand-in-the-air vibe.

I then plugged that image into "Dream by WOMBO," another cool AI image generator with a bunch of different algorithms. As a side note, this is the program I used to generate the starting points for my "Gods" NFT series on Tezos: https://objkt.com/collection/KT1M35Ux71gHEUyaU7fb7L2GisqiH6X84Uk2

WOMBO is really cool because you can show it an image, tell it how much you want the image to affect the final output, and additionally give it a word prompt to work with. I believe I used the phrase "Alien DJ." Another cool thing is that the paid version of the app (which I have) will give you four different creations, and you can then choose one of those to make more variations, and then iterate even further on those. example:

Sometimes you can end up with something wildly different that what you started with:

I really liked some of the results I got from an algorithm called "Cartoonist":

But ultimately decided to go with an algorithm that generated versions which appeared to be to be a bit more lifelike:

These were starting to look a bit scarier than I'd prefer, but once I got this one I knew I had found my gem:

Unfortunately, Wombo will only render images in one size, so I had to distort it to make a square image for album art purposes:

Next I wanted to be able to layer and accentuate the character from the background, so I copied the image onto a new layer and erased the background:

Then I quickly drew this nifty pattern using iOrnament:

and layered it between the original image, and the character with the erased background, and set the layer style to "Linear Burn"

Then I duplicated the character and made a couple glitchy affected versions and layered them behind the solid character, just to add some depth and more interesting elements:

Now all that was left was some lettering, which honestly looking at it now, I think I could have done a better job on, but it's alright. Did some block letterings in a light color with a dark outline, then added a polkadot pattern on it and some drop shadowing:

And there we have it, the perfect avatar for a psytrance dj! 👽
https://www.mixcloud.com/robvector/

I know that AI art is controversial, but for myself being a musician and DJ who hasn't spent years expertly honing visual art skills, AI is proving itself to be an invaluable tool for creating awesome looking visuals to compliment my non-visual art. I can't ever imagine AI replacing artists because the more you play around with this software the more you really get a feel for how soulless it truly is. Even for something simple, it really requires a human to direct the process and edit fine details.