Physical Books Are Shipping

Yes, it's that word we've been all waiting to hear. Shipping! The books finally got onshore a few days ago and arrived yesterday at the US distribution center. Shipping will start this morning, and will continue over the next few weeks as they chew through all 1300 orders.

I am so happy after the delays to finally get everyone their physical books. Next time I'll think twice before trying to manufacture a book during a pandemic. :) A huge thank you to the 99.9% of you who were super patient and waited for the books like champs, many of you even sent me wonderful words of encouragement during the supply chain issues, your kindness will never be forgotten!

If you're on social media, please post a pic of your book and link me so I can see that the book arrived safe and sound. And of course I'm always open to your thoughts on the final product, positive or constructive criticism, it will help me in my decision making process on future projects. And once all the books have shipped, I'll send another note to confirm all the books are on their way. Any issues or problems, please email me.

If you haven't bought a book yet, there's still a few left, so feel free to check it out and order today!: http://www.neilblevins.com/books/megastructures/megastructures.htm

One last tremendous thank you to all, and I hope to continue to see you on the web. Megastructures has been a huge labor of love, and it wouldn't have been possible without you!

2 Video Tutorials

Looks like today is going to be a tutorial two-fer! 

Lesson #1:

Going to post a few older gumroad videos for free on youtube in the coming weeks, starting with this one. To create my painting "Megastructures Krasnikov Tube", I decided to limit myself to using 2d perspective grids rather than creating a full 3d image. This tutorial goes into all the details of how to use grids to paint in 1 point, 2 point and 3 point perspective, and using Photoshop's transform - Deform tool to put flat objects into proper perspective. The first half of the video shows all the theory, and the second half shows a portion of my actual process creating the final painting at double speed with narration. Achieving proper perspective is an important fundamental skill and this video will give you some tips and tricks how to add more accurate perspective to your own imagery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0_lgNBaZac

Lesson #2:

With the current crop of AI Art Generators, your two major inputs are image prompts and text prompts. This tutorial is going to be focusing on text prompts in Midjourney, and asks the question do all of the keywords people tend to add to their prompt really affect the final image? Or are they actually not contributing at all, and maybe even confusing the AI? This tutorial shows some experiments I did with the Midjourney AI trying to figure out what are the most useful and least useful keywords, and I hope by presenting them it gives you a better idea of the best way to turn your ideas into images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PGjVWU599s

Robot Head 78

Robot head doodle, sorta trash can lid shaped.

Buried In The Deep

Doing a little fantasy for a change, a combo of hand paint in Photoshop and some bashed elements generated by midjourney.

Giant Robot 12

After Star Wars, my second biggest inspiration as a kid was the Super Robots of Grendizer and Mazinger Z. This is a tribute to the bad robots in those series. This is another Midjourney collaboration, I started as an older painting of mine, I then used a text prompt in Midjourney to create a bunch of variations on that painting, then I used elements of the variations as photobash parts, rearranging them and painting over top using Photoshop to create the final image. 

New Video Tutorial: The Final Push

As many of you know, I've been playing a lot recently with AI generated artwork, especially creating robot designs. However, one thing I've been unable to achieve in midjourney (the AI I've been currently using) is a 3/4 view of the robot designs. All of them end up being frontal view only. This is likely because the images the AI trained on either haven't been 3/4 view, or maybe they have but that particular attribute hasn't been labeled, and so the AI hasn't learned what a 3/4 perspective is. While I'm sure this will be fixed in the future, I've been playing with giving the robots depth by projecting the artwork onto simple 3d geometry. So this tutorial discusses this technique which I used to make my painting "The Final Push". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMU9TAF3dg

The Final Push

The mechanized war front! This image uses a little ai, some 3d, photobashing, hand paint, pretty much every technique under the sun. Will post a lesson tomorrow on how I made it, in the meantime, hope you enjoy the painting!

New Written Tutorial: 10 Things To Check Before Calling A Painting Done

Just posted a written tutorial on the last steps I take before calling a painting done. Art isn't finished, it's abandoned, but before you abandon it, give these a try...

http://neilblevins.com/art_lessons/tweaks_top_10/tweaks_top_10.htm

Battle Droid 4

Another batteldroid, same technique as before, midjourney based variations on my original painting, then photobashed the variations to make the final robot.

Same Settings, Different Base Painting

Example of identical AI settings but applied to different base paintings. The 1st robot's color and camera lens details appear in the AI version.

The 2nd is redder, and has the inset holes from the prompt painting.

And the 3rd's swords appear as spiky limbs in the ai results.

Fun to find all the details from the original paintings that get captured in the ai results, and all the ways they heavily deviate. Hope to see more fine level control be added in future iterations.