Jack of Harts

The Storm Breaker background I created for my Jackofharts substack was another case of a long and relatively difficult process. As usual, I wrote a series of prompts that fit the story. My original prompts were trying to get all four characters in the story, but those created wildly unusable results. Most render engines break down when you attempt to use more than one character. And the more characters you add, the more the results break down. So I settled on just showing a cowboy wearing a brown duster and cowboy hat walking away from the camera in Texas, into a hurricane or a storm in the background. Abstract art with large brushes.

I tried numerous engines and derivations on that general prompt at dezgo.com until finding that Dreamshaper XL Lightning would get the closest to what I wanted. As I found when doing the Goblins in the Marketplace background, it really liked to show the face, even when I told it not to. So I went through hundreds of generations where it simply ignored every derivation I could come up with of “don’t show a face” to get down to around a hundred that were passably what I asked for. I cut those down to around forty that I liked, and then down to around four finalists that I thought would look good as a cover image.

It is ironic, considering how hard I worked to get images that did not include the face, the one image I kept not deleting even though it showed a profile of the face was the one I picked in the end. It had a storm background that would be easy to put words over, and it carried the energy I wanted. Captain William Carter, hunter of otherworldly creatures and threats to mankind, walking into a storm.