Jack of Harts

This is the base image that I designed for Goblins in the Marketplace for my substack. It is not a professional cover by a professional artist. I use professional artists for my final covers that go on sale, but on substack I will prefer to put my own creativity to work. I designed this image using the Juggernaut XL9 AI art engine on dezgo.com. I recognize that some people hate AI art, and that is fine. You can do that if you like. I will not stop you. But I will also continue to use it for my own purposes.

I am a writer, and I use that writing to prompt the AI into generating what I want. I wrote the prompts for this piece of art, which is basically an Old World Fantasy market with many colored tents with a blonde fairy woman looking away from the camera, using an abstract style with large brush strokes. I had a number of derivations on that general theme as I experimented to get down to the look that I liked. Different orders, different weights. How to tell the AI that I really mean it when I ask for something. It can sometimes be a challenge.

I ran the final versions of the prompt on four browser windows, using many engines to see what they would look like. Dreamshaper XL was really close, but had a MASSIVE bias towards turning the head so I could see the face. I tried every single prompt I could think of, and even asked others for help, and nothing would stop it from showing a face. I finally picked Juggernaut XL9, which got the hint at least half of the time. I probably ran four to five hundred of instances, throwing out the images that didn’t look like I wanted. I ended up saving around a hundred of them that at least got the general idea right.

Then I scanned for the various artifacts that AI art does. Bad hands, weird proportions. Men wearing tshirts and blue jeans when I asked for Old World Fantasy. All of the crazy that AI puts in. That cut it down to 20 finalists. Of the twenty I liked, I picked one that I liked the best. I used Dezgo AI to double the size of that image, and went into my final cover creation process.

I took that image into Paint Shop Pro, an image editing program I’ve used for literal decades, reformatted it into a different shape, and added the title and my name onto a layer specifically set aside for them so I would not damage the underlying art. It took around a week of rendering images to get the finalists I liked, and then fifteen minutes or so to do the final touches. Ironically, finding a fill color for the lettering that was easily readable across the different colors of the art was a challenge that took a while. It is a rather colorful image, and it took a lot of tries to find colors that worked.

You can check out the final version with text on yesterday’s posting. This is the base file that I wanted to share it with you. It took a long time and a lot of arguing with the AI to get this image. Because I really did mean it when I said I wanted the elegant fairy woman to be looking away from the camera.