{"id":14091,"date":"2025-08-24T00:01:21","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T05:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=14091"},"modified":"2025-08-24T11:28:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:28:15","slug":"goblins-in-the-marketplace-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/?p=14091","title":{"rendered":"Goblins in the Marketplace image"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t look like I wanted. I ended up saving around a hundred of them that at least got the general idea right.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I took that image into Paint Shop Pro, an image editing program I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

You can check out the final version with text on yesterday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-medron-pryde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14093,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14091\/revisions\/14093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}