[AnimagineXL] Tired Kitsune Artist
I tried a couple times with other models, decided to try this one.
The idea is a kitsune woman drawing (or paused in the middle of drawing) a knight while lying on the floor. My previous attempts resulted in various things including a disembodied human arm painting a seemingly 3d kitsune face in the middle of ink blob on the floor in the middle of some papers, looking like it's a coming out of an ink portal or something. Cool, but not even vaguely close to what I was looking for. Weird stuff like that, or the knight (supposed to be the drawing) actually being the artist, and just random papers scattered around.
Scanned through AnimagineXL's description, grabbed the author-suggested positive/negative prompts and threw together a first try - of course, I forgot to include the VAE. Derp. While I only generated 4, they all came far closer to what I had been looking for and this one in particular. All four of them however have the kitsune (2) or human (2) artist look like they're lying there because they're just done. Tired, idk. It's not the emotion/feeling I had in mind but it still came out alright.
(Tried regenerating this image with the VAE. In this particular image's case, given what I was looking for, it came out a little worse. Not that the quality dropped, it just changed things such that it isn't as close to what I was looking for; she is a bit more done. Unlike this image where she looks like she was doing something and then just relaxed there... She instead looks like she just kind of collapsed to the ground. Her body is straighter and we can only see the back of her head because her face is pressed straight onto the floor)
Honestly, I'd be happy with this image if it didn't have the brush in the left hand and the hand gripping the right brush came out better. Going to download it and see if a quick inpaint in A1111 can do it.
-> "Quick" inpaint. Yeah. I am still learning how to make inpainting work for me instead of me working for it.
The brush on the left was pretty easy, at least. I used inpaint sketch, just drew over the whole thing with white and tossed 'brush' into the negative prompt, with 'paper' in the positive. Try a few variations on denoising strength etc. and it was gone. Faint hints of its outline lingered. img2img, which honestly I should have saved until the END of the process, but I did it here. Kind of wanted to see if it would clean up her face a bit too.
Face... I had a few minor issues with it; the nose/hairline just looked off to me. The img2img didn't do it (at least not at denoise levels that didn't completely alter the composition of the image in ways I didn't want)... So, inpainted the whole face. Fiddled with a few options; ended up telling it to focus only on the masked area, deleted the prompt except suggested qualifiers, then added "tired kitsune woman, small nose" (the issue I had wasn't that she had a large nose, but there was a large discrepancy in the nose region; I wasn't sure how it was going to interpret that area and if it interpreted the whole thing as her nose that would be like half her face is a nose; so 'small nose' was there to counteract that potential). Came out pretty darn good after a couple tries. First time I tried, I went with 'fill' type, and it ended up painting in her haircolor over the whole face then tinting it only slightly towards skin color while also drawing a tiny blurry face in the corner. Yeah. Like I said, I'm still figuring this out XD
After the face, came the right hand. I just could not get her right hand to have 5 digits while maintaining coherence. After trying tons of denoise levels, different masking types, different selection areas, etc... managed to get a decent quality 4 digit hand that kept coherence, said 'screw it' and tossed that in GIMP.
Lasso'd the middle of the 3 fingers, copied it to a new layer (twice), rotated and moved the two around slightly, resaved. Threw it back in under inpaint and voila; a hand that looks nice (wayyyyyy nicer than I could have done manually; my art skills are lackluster).
The left hand was still a bit funky, and this was the last region of the image I felt needed any touch up. So I tried inpainting it a few times, and this time found myself struggling to get it sized appropriately. It was happy to make a good looking hand, but it just looked way too big compared to the right hand no matter what I was doing. One time, it randomly decided to change it so the fingers were splayed in an open palm... Still not good, but I saw the potential since changing the position and angle of the hand made the previous issues less significant.
The issue lay primarily once again in making sure there were 5 digits, and the image was coherent - so she was palming the paper and there wasn't anything bizarre going on.
Took me a few tries before I realized it was trying to create a right hand instead of a left hand when converting the hand to be palm down and that was part of my issue. Definitely not the only part, but certainly a part of it. Explicitly included "left hand" in the prompt didn't do anything. Then I realized: AI is going to fix whatever crap I do to this, so why not just copy the right hand, mirror it, and throw it over the left hand?
It's already a closed hand, it already has 5 digits, it looks coherent.. Just need to make sure not to copy the brush over too.
So, back to GIMP we go and I once again use that tool to commit crimes against art.
Aside from it looking absolutely bad when first just copying it over to the left, I noticed that even the base image's hand is indeed a good 20% larger on the left than the right. Not EVERYTHING, but the index finger certainly is.
By the time I was finished, it was well and truly butchered. But, fortunately, we have stable diffusion. So now I just have to run my monster hand through inpainting to generate a merely gross hand (with all the right fingers! even if they were fused a bit), and refine it from there.
Not enough denoising, too much denoising, all the usual problems... But eventually I got one that looked alright.
Now I've made changes to the face and both hands that come with their associated merging issues... Run it through img2img at a very low denoise level one more time (this SHOULD be when I fixed the remnants of the left brush as well... but I did that early) to help properly merge the tweaks into the overall image, and we're done! (0.1 was too much, 0.05 did some weird things, even 0.03 was still tweaking a couple things more than I wanted -- but at that level, while the merging did happen to some degree the the wood near the right hand was still faded/blurred out... Urgh.
So, threw two copies of the image into GIMP (one before the right hand fix as the background, final image I was *attempting* (and failing) to clean up with minor img2img denoise as the foreground) and just deleted the area around the hand that didn't mess anything up. That still had issues, so used heal/clone to futz about with it. Then did the img2img with super low denoise; this merged it pretty well. But lost some detail in places, especially the face. Threw THAT version into GIMP, reverted the face, made a few minor tweaks, and now we're done.
Certainly not a masterpiece, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Not happy with how long it took me, but whatever. I will get better eventually :P
Anyways, no idea why I blabbed on so long. Probably nobody is going to read this anyways. But whatever :)