My vision years ago
Years ago, when I was just dreaming about my website, I already had a vision of how I would like to see my poems published. I envisioned accompanying each page with an artistic illustration that reflected the mood of my poem. Earlier I thought I might want to get an illustrator to do these. Since this is not about illustrating a book, which we do once and it’s done, but a unique image must be created for each post. So the problem arose that I couldn’t share the new poems until the illustrator had drawn the picture. This would have made it difficult to publish my writings. It was already certain that I had to find another solution.
“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert
What inspired the solution?
A few weeks ago, one of my dear friends created a fantasy-themed AI image creation contest. This was the first time I used AI, as I had no need for it before. The AI is very easy to use, yet creating the desired details was a challenge every time. The fantasy images had to be modeled based on the characters of a game that we play together. I tried to add features to the images that refer to the owner of the characters – whenever this was possible. I spent days generating images until I got a result I was happy with. I enjoyed to work on the pictures.
How were the illustrations made?
The fantasy picture creation AI contest inspired me to create the illustration for my own poems with the help of AI. I thought about the poem and imagined how I could create its mood in pictures. What technique would I choose for it? Should I draw or rather paint? And when I came to a decision, I described my vision to the AI in 3-4 short sentence and generated the images. I refined the description based on the results I saw. After each change, new images had to be generated and the details had to be worked on based on them. Slowly, step by step, until the image reached the desired composition. You can see the finished illustrations on the Poems page.
“Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.”
– Idowu Koyenikan