midjourney | Furry Friend's Den

I love photography in Black & White. Without the distraction of colors, one can truly focus on the composition of a Black & White photo.
One of my favorite elective courses in college was Photography, and all of our assignments were Black & White. We learned how to develop film and make prints. I loved the experience.
Like most hobbies, it’s expensive. Cameras, Dark Room, Chemicals, Enlargers, Photo Print paper. So once the semester ended, my short experience in Black & White photography was over. But 40 years later I still remember how much I enjoyed it.
Enter the recent and rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, and my favorite application of A.I., image generation. I’m surprised that my early experience with this technology has (so far) excluded generating images in Black & White.

Until now.

I’m blessed with many friends and acquaintances, but only one of them seems to have a comparable interest in A.I. Image generation. In fact, it was him posting some of his creations using Midjourney that sparked my interest in exploring the best online resources for making my own A.I. images. This friend only uses Midjourney, but I’m not willing to subscribe, and despite great effort, I haven’t found a way to use Midjourney for free.
This friend recently complained about censorship & sexual bias on Midjourney. He has observed seeing scores of scantily clad girls with visible tits created on this platform, but asking for a guy in a speedo gets a warning that it violates community standards.
Admittedly the images from Midjourney are typically more realistic with higher definition than what I have been able to make with Stable Diffusion models, but I like having the ability to make image content that my friend can’t get from Midjourney!

My friend loves bear-ish, mature, leather men, bearded and stern looking. His latest posts have been in Black and White. They were quite stunning. I was curious what I could coax out of Stable Diffusion models using similar prompts to his, which resulted in this collection:

I also did a couple images in Color, to demonstrate the freedom of composition that Stable Diffusion models offer:

Some unfortunate anatomical errors here that I didn’t have the patience to correct!

That’s all for now. 🙂

What will they do for you (or to you)? 👹 Let your imagination run wild 😝

All of these were created on Tensor.art, which has easily become my favorite site for creating A.I. images. I haven’t encountered any “censorship” or “blocks” to the prompts I want to use, and there is a robust collection of different A.I. models that are available to try, including ones that can produce NSFW (not safe for work) images.

I used the built-in Random Prompt generator, and then made some changes to the suggested prompt. Here is the first prompt I ran: (Masterpiece, Best Quality:1.3), highres, (8k resolution), madgod, horror, flying, hairy muscular demon, full angle view, hyperrealistic, full background:

Sexy body, but I decided to tweak the prompt to the following: (Masterpiece, Best Quality:1.3), highres, (8k resolution), madgod, handsome, flying, hairy, muscular, red-skinned, demon, full angle view, hyperrealistic, full background,best quality:

Not exactly what I’d call “Handsome”. The background also seemed weird for a Demon subject matter. I stuck with the same A.I. model as above, and added the following to prompt: “night scene, moonlit, horror genre”:

LOVE the background, but still not Handsome 🫤. I’ve read that putting parentheses around words or phrases in your prompt will emphasize them and give them higher priority in generating the image, so I gave that a try:

Cross between Demon and Incredible Hulk??

Still not getting quite what I want, so I try a different A.I. model I’ve had good results with in the past (Virile Fantasy – v1.1), and make more substantive changes to the Prompt: Handsome, hairy, muscular, red-skinned, demon, full angle view, hyperrealistic, full background,best quality, night scene, moonlit, mischievous expression. Which produces this:

I switch the A.I. model to Virile Animation – v1.0. This model is from the same developer of Virile Fantasy, but “attempts to explore a more “drawn/anime” look”. I also emphasize Handsome by adding two sets of parentheses ((Handsome)), which gives me my favorite image of the whole series:

I did some editing in Sketchbook to correct some features that were bothering me (extra finger, irregular shaped Moon, wings not proportionate to body). I’m quite happy with this. I could picture an entire Comic Book series around this character! What should I name him?