[ZavyChromaXL] Si Yuanbai AI-generated Fan Art (The Mirror Legacy, ch19)
“What a promising youth!” Si Yuanbai murmured in approval as he stroked his beard.
...
With that thought in mind, Si Yuanbai performed a hand seal to undo his invisibility spell and descended gracefully into the courtyard.
...
The figure who appeared was clad in azure garments, seemingly in his thirties or forties, with a handsome appearance. He wore a friendly smile, and at his waist hung a shiny sword, adding to his elegant and ethereal demeanor.
>>>JaxdL
Sounds very elegant, any fanart?
Well, there is now. First image is the final result.
Process
Image 1: Final result, so there ya go. That's not really part of the process though.
Used ZavyChromaXL for the whole process; tried varying stepcounts and prompts, tried various ways to call out the robes, different descriptors for the man, descriptors for the sword... Gave up on getting it all in one after the sword ruined several otherwise excellent images.
Image 2: is the final candidate I moved forward on to the next steps
Image 3: found a picture of a Tai Chi sword, couldn't get anything at the angle I wanted so I did a hatchet job of it (... yeah, me committing crimes against art is a theme in my processes), threw it together in GIMP in a couple minutes [most of which was wasted time, the actual work took like 30 seconds - the rest was futzing about figuring out what I was doing]
Image 4: Started with img2img at a few low-ish denoise values. This was my 5th result. Tried doing inpainting, and several other things, but the sword kept coming out funky. Gave up after a lot more tries than I should have, and accepted this and moved on.
>> Tried inpainting, sketch inpainting, all kinds of other things to get a proper loop to hold the sword to the belt. Occasionally would get it to look vaguely like the right sort of thing but trying to merge it into the image so it looked like it fit was a disaster.
Image 5: Decided to just fix the major issues and call it a day - dude looks too old (later chapters he is described as not looking old, but the knock-off gandalf looked a bit too old) - so wanted to get rid of a few wrinkles and change the beard/hair color. Also had to get his smile back, lost it when adding the sword. While doing this, got a lot of NaNs for no reason so I kept changing a few words here and there.
>>>Eventually changed 'wizard robes' to 'chinese cultivator robes' and he changed from a white dude to a chinese man. I was like:
"What? I didn't mean to do... Wait, this is a chinese novel, it's a chinese culture, it's a chinese cultivator. Wow, I almost fucked up by not thinking about ethnicity! Also, he doesn't look as old. Nice."
>>>Tweaked the prompt a little, generated a couple more times and one time the sword came out looking closer to the body. Still not properly hooked to anything, but I yield on that front. Even after painting in a proper hook and iterating on my butcher job of the image it would turn that hook into a mini belt or something. Ugh. Fuck it, he can hold it in place with cultivator magic.
Yeah, there should probably be a courtyard wall in the background but I don't care, I like how the background came out in the end, even if the string of greenish lights is illogical. Probably should've put a moon in there too, but the moon could be behind the viewer so whatever. I'm happy with it, if you aren't... Well, I don't care :D