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.

Sword & Sorcery tales are songs of great deeds. Tales of heroes who stand in the gap at the moment of need, who take the battle to the diabolical foes, who turn their back upon the easy life and seek a greater challenge. Any greater challenge. Every greater challenge.

Drawn blades and sly grins, keen eyes and quick hearts. They storm the abandoned ruined castles and dungeons filled with the stench of evil, the lairs of chaos, the horrors of the grave. They dare Death to come for them and just try to take them. Go check out those amazing tales if you feel like you can handle them.