I deeply appreciate the clients who have repeatedly brought me wonderful assignments and are not just clients, but friends. I love and still enjoy what I do.

The post Celebrating 31 years! first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

Continuing my exploration of style reference (—sref) by the numbers, I came across —sref 200, and every image produced looks like a potential quilt! Style Reference 200 produces images somewhere between surreal and primitive and looks like it’s composed of pieces of fabric.

I hope Judy decides to make some quilts based on these images! Just have to shop for the right fabrics!

The post Exploring Quilt Concepts with Midjourney 6 —sref 200 first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

You’ll see by the 2nd and 3rd image that I came very close to duplicating the effect, but it wasn’t easy—at all!

When I tried to explain to MJ what I wanted I prompted this: drone photography vertical camera tilting up starting looking down at a cornfield landscape while the drone quickly descends toward the ground, golden hour –ar 9:16 –s 50 –v 6.0. I got nice golden-hour images of cornfields—but no curved panoramic view.

I knew my prompt wasn’t working, so I went to Microsoft Bing and told it: I want to write an image prompt that will create an image I’m describing here: a drone looking straight down at the ground at a Kansas cornfield. As the drone quickly descends toward the ground it does a vertical camera tilt upward so the camera creates essentially a vertical panoramic view. The results should be that the photograph looks like the top if the image is a down view and transitions into a low-angle view of the same cornfield. The image should look like the ground is curved and the down view would appear to be a vertical wall curving into a lower-angle view of the field.

Bing thought that was an interesting prompting challenge and it wrote this prompt: a drone camera capturing a vertical panorama of a Kansas cornfield, starting from a bird’s eye view looking straight down and tilting up as the drone quickly descends to a lower view of the cornfield, creating a curved perspective of the ground and the horizon, with realistic colors and lighting, and a clear sky. It also generated 4 images using Dall-E 3 and one of the 4 images is my third image here. WOW! It worked—at least once!

I took the Bing prompt and submitted it to Midjourney and MJ still didn’t get what was wanted. Tried several times modifying the prompt and still pretty cornfields—no curved panorama.

I tried Musavir, Leonardo, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E 3 in Pictgen. No luck so I returned to Bing with Dall-E 3 and continued generating images and trying different modifications to the prompt. These two cornfield images were the only ones that came out duplicating the effect of the train yard drone photo. 

In total openness, both of these images had a drone in the lower center of the images so I removed them generating fill in Photoshop 2024. I explained to Bing that the camera was on the drone so we wouldn’t see the drone, and it agreed, but still got drones in some of the images.

In addition to the two that gave good results, I’ve included here some of the ones that didn’t give the right results but still fascinating images. Note: not all from the same prompt, but various trial rewrites.

The post How did he create that photo? Can AI duplicate? first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

Somebody asked me recently “How do you come up with your ideas?” Well, this project is a good example.

First I wanted to explore a variety of art styles and decided to do a portrait series of mixed-race young women in a limited pallet of blues and violets.

That made me think of Duke Ellington’s song “Mood Indigo.” I actually looked up the lyrics and was going to print them in this post, but then I thought, “I’ve paid to use Udio for creating music, so I dropped the “Mood Indigo” idea and proceeded to create a new song with Udio.

Because of the blue colors and the sad and lonely mood I prompted for the image results, it was natural to create a blues song. I asked Udio to write the following—a slow New Orleans blues song about rain and loneliness sung by an older woman with a gravely voice. I selected a few button settings—blues, vocal, R&B, New Orleans blues. It then created 2 30-second tracks which I then extended my preferred track by an additional 30 seconds 3 times.

Udio never gave me an ending nor did it repeat the refrain, so I brought the soundtrack into CapCut and edited the track.

Because of the lyrics, I had to create a few additional images to tie in with the lyrics. I then assembled them in the appropriate order in time with the music and then added a bunch of CapCut effects to give me the rain, lightning, and transitions.

So I guess that’s the evolution of the idea of this music video entitled “Echos of Your Goodbye.” Hope you enjoy it!

The post Echos of Your Goodbye first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

Knowing Margarida Barreto for about a year, I wouldn’t expect anything from her to be less than excellent! On that point, her book doesn’t disappoint! Her subtitle is “Generative creative images from text prompts and seamlessly integrating them into your workflow.” But it could have been “Everything there is to know about Midjourney—finally all in one place!”

I consider myself an expert on Midjourney, but there were a number of things in Margarida’s book that I didn’t know before reading it. The book discusses the history of AI, the history and development of Midjourney, and best of all, the majority of the book is about prompting in explicit terms and is filled with beautifully generated images to illustrate every detail about prompting. 

After Margarida gives a “Quick Start Guide” for beginners, she goes into an excellent 30-page detailed explanation of parameters. Part 3 of her book discusses “Advanced Prompts” and how to upgrade them tor “Optimal Results.” Settings are also discussed thoroughly and how to fully utilize the “Style Tuner.”

“Part 4: Prompting for the Real World” explores practical use cases and pushing boundaries, tips, tricks, and special functions. This 306-page book had to be that long to include everything that Margarida has shared in this exquisitely detailed and exquisitely illustrated gem of a book. I guarantee beginner or experienced pro, you’ll learn much from this book!

The post My review of “MIDJOURNEY EXPEDITION” first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

Though this book is about using DALL-E 3, it an excellent book to read no matter the text-to-image platform you are currently using. The book is a good read for both beginners and advanced prompters covering subjects that apply to any AI image creation.

“Part 1: Getting to know DALL-E 3” not only explains prompting, but also gives many examples of various prompts and their explanations covering things like camera angles and lens settings, lighting, film types, illustration styles, art movements, human elements (like hair and jewelry styles), and places and settings. It goes into prompt structure, variations and fine-tuning, as well as inpainting and outpainting.

“Part 2: Practical Applications” delves into crafting and selling fine art prints. It has a detailed explanation of how to set up NFTs for sale and it discusses book covers, magazines and other publications.

“Part 3: The Future of AI and Art” explores ethical questions, copyright infringement, and machine bias. Then it revisits prompting with a wealth of “Effective Prompt Cheat Sheet” hints and prompt suggestions. Finishing off with some case studies and interviews of 3 pioneers in AI.

As you can see this is a very complete and detailed book and worth the time to read and learn. Here’s a link to the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/183508771X/?link_from_packtlink=yes

The post Generating Creative Images With DALL-E 3 first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

The post My Review of Musavir first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

I think you have to be an artist/designer/illustrator/art director/creative director/writer/musician/composer/singer/film maker/architect to fully appreciate the truth in that statement. But the artist puts themselves totally into whatever they create. Their work is personal—so personal that when an artist creates and looks at the finished piece, they say to themselves, “That is me! I did that!” There are so few occupations that have tangible proof of what they do. But an artist—they delve deeply into themselves to pull out something from their gut to create. 

Some ideas come as a spark, an instant concept that they know is perfect! Other concepts take work, agony, sweat, sleepless nights. Either way, the solution is them! Burst out or pulled out, it is deeply and completely who they are. Collaborations are still the same—they’re just a blend of various artists guts or souls. 

If you are an artist, you get it! If you’re not, my words are hyperbole. But why am I approaching 60 years in advertising (June 2024), it’s because ever since I was two years old and started to draw, I have enjoyed saying “See this? I did this! This is who I am!” When I show you something I’ve done, it isn’t bragging. It’s me saying “Share the joy of what I’ve created with me!”

Each of you artists, celebrate yourselves! The Artist is the Art!

Images 1-9 created by me in Midjourney

Images 10-19 created by me in Dall-E 3 with Bing

Images 20-28 created by me in Musavir

The post The Artist is the Art first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

Infinite Geometric Series

Finite Geometric Series

Binomial Expansion

Taylor Polynomial (When I used “Taylor Series” it thought I wanted pictures of women—like in Taylor Swift)

Natural Logarithm (this is just to end with a laugh—you’ll see what I mean!)

If you want to know the definition of any of these, I invite you to search Wikipedia! In the meantime, enjoy the results of these terms used as prompts.

The post More Mathematical Prompts first appeared on Boundless Creativity.

It did come in handy one year while working on my MA in Mass Communications and TV Production, I did some substitute teaching. During that time, a math teacher at Lincoln Park High quit in March to become a golf pro. I could only substitute 2 days a week and another guy could do 3 days a week, so between the two of us we took over the math classes teaching Algebra, Geometry, and Remedial Math until the end of the school year.

That’s the background behind my fascination with Fractals and Fibonacci Sequence in my posts a couple months ago. I investigated other mathematical terms at the time, but never posted the results of my exploration because of my busy work schedule. This post concentrates on Parametric Equations.

Last night I took a look at the results (back then using MJ5) and tried the prompts again last night with 5.2. Additionally, when the same two prompts were combined with the Style Raw and high stylize settings of 750 or 1000, suddenly the 2D results, created with stylize 50, became dimensional!

No I didn’t make up this first prompt on my own. I did choose “A highly detailed airbrush painting, using a parametric equation to create captivating art” as the subject, but the rest of the prompt was copying a formula found on line.

Prompt 1: A highly detailed airbrush painting, using a parametric equation to create captivating art, x(t) = A * cos(a * t) * cos(t) + A * sin(b * t) * cos(t) and y(t) = A * cos(a * t) * sin(t) + A * sin(b * t) * sin(t), where ‘A’, ‘a’, and ‘b’ are constants, and ‘t’ ranges from 0 to 2π. By experimenting with different values for ‘A’, ‘a’, and ‘b’, you can generate a variety of intriguing and visually appealing designs, combine this with other artistic elements and styles to create a captivating abstract design –ar 16:9

To see if the equation was actually effecting the image results, I then simplified the prompt.

Prompt 2: highly detailed airbrush painting using a parametric equation to create captivating art –ar 16:9 –s 50

The results were equally fascinating, with some differences without the equation.

Other mathematical terms explorations coming soon.

The post Parametric Equations first appeared on Boundless Creativity.