Hello everyone! =)
After almost 3 months of work, we are finally ready to submit our blueprint, Mary Shelley's Notebook, to AsyncArt for approval. There is only one thing left to do: Write this post talking about our inspiration and our process.
Long before we knew about A.I., we'd already thought of an idea for a blueprint - some kind of creature being generated in a science lab, within a glass vat, with labels and little diagrams describing each part that was generated.
But then life happened - a lot of personal things that we won't go into now - so it never got off the ground.
Then, A.I. took the world by storm, and we were as intrigued as everyone else. So we set up @cryptoyevsky on Twitter and began experimenting:
Something in these first prompts made us think of Mary Shelley and her Dr. Frankenstein, which was eventually married with our initial idea for the creature blueprint, already half-forgotten.
So we got to work.
The first thing we worked on were the backgrounds. In the beginning, we just wanted one. A science lab with a giant glass vat, in which our creature would grow..:
The image above is a very small sample of the number of attempts we made. We personally feel that the popular term "prompt engineer" is a little ostentatious, but it's certainly true that it is a difficult process, trying to get what you're imagining using text.
Eventually, we "hit gold" and found this:
It was almost perfect. With some editing, we widened the vat and emptied out the paraphernalia within it, and the scientist was an added bonus! The whole scene gave us the impression of a 1930s/40s nazi eugenics lab, and indeed, we call this scene Dr. Zola's Lab, after the fictional Dr. Zola from the Marvel universe who works for Hydra.
Having this idea, we suddenly asked, why not have several scenes/backgrounds, all from popular culture? Suddenly we had lots to choose from, but eventually settled on 5 more: Cthulu, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the Arthurian Legend (Merlin), and two from real life: alchemy from the middle ages and gangsters in the 1920s.
We were very happy with these and couldn't wait to get started on the creature, but we soon discovered that everything up until that point, even if a bit time consuming, had been fun and relatively easy.
We weren't yet sure about the whole concept. What kind of creature would it be? Where would Mary Shelley fit in, besides being the initial inspiration? And, most difficult, how would we be able to create several creatures using MidJourney that could be used in a blueprint?
After a terribly long time experimenting with all kinds of weird creatures, we eventually settled on a humanoid shape - both to make things easier when combining them all up in photoshop so that they would look good when reassembled with different parts, and also because a humanoid shape fits well with Mary Shelley's story of Frankenstein's monster.
Even still, it was extremely difficult to get each humanoid creature into the decided-on pose (turned slightly to the left). And in the case of Magmarr, the "fire creature" we settled on (top left), we had to flip and edit him quite heavily:
It took forever, and we experimented with all kinds of prompts. Here are humanoids made of taffy (and also a dark-glass fairy) that we eventually decided just wouldn't work XD ... :
It took about a month before we had all 9 creatures - and then the really hard work began: Editing them, chopping them up (head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg and right leg), and making sure that each limb and the head looked as natural as possible when combined with any torso:
Once that was done, there was the added work of making sure all the layers were in the exact order, and adding all the lines, text and squares and copies of all the limbs to be placed inside the squares. And it all had to be done 6 times - one for every background scene.
Last of all, the legend editions. While working on the creatures, we solidified our idea of the concept - Mary Shelley's Notebook - a notebook found by various groups long after Mary's death, in which is described the method for how to create a powerful creature that would obey its master.
And thus, we went to work on the 9 "silver" legend editions (there is also 1 gold legend, which will remain a mystery until someone finds it ;) )
In fact, we'll stop here and leave the 9 silver legends as a surprise too ;) If you're curious enough, you might find one example of them somewhere around ^-^ .. And here are a few test samples, so you know what the end result looks like:
Thank you for reading this far, and we hope you decide to mint an Experiment of your own! =) If you do, please reply here and/or on Twitter to show us what combination of creature you cook up =) Here is the link to the Async mint page - It will be live on the 31st of January at 11am.
Below are our Twitter links. Feel free to tag us =)
"Cryptoyevsky" is an alter-ego created by Alejandra and Mandelsage. If you want to know more, please read our introduction post.
This is a really awesome concept and design. From the looks of it, the execution turned out very well done.
Many thanks Castleberry ^-^
Do you remember me (Mandelsage) from the early days? =)
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Really nice concept, your photo-bashing is also well done, all this gives something very homogeneous and successful.
It's really inspiring, and makes us want to see more 🤗