The 2d Art Thread

[rovingjack]

I gotta find better hosting for images, as these link go dead quickly.

[SeVeNeVeS]

I gotta find better hosting for images, as these link go dead quickly.

https://imgbb.com/

[rovingjack]

[J. Wilhelm]

Not related to Valkyrie (I'll start a new thread for that).

As an experiment I asked Stable Diffusion to give me a photo of 1920s actress Louise Brooks wearing a 1999 silver dress made by Prada.

Prompt: "Photograph of 1920s actress Louise Brooks wearing a 1999 silver dress made by Prada"
Negative Prompt: "Cartoon"
Generated with: Deliberate

Reference Image: Someone who looks very different; model Hunter Schafer in the 2021 Met Gala, wearing a 1999 silver dress by Prada:
https://www.popsugar.com/fashion/hunter-schafer-prada-look-met-gala-2021-48505855

I didn't get the Prada dress, but Louise Brooks came out loud and clear in a silver dress on the first try without a portrait of her! I got 5 images, out of which three were usable. How well somebody's face is known in the media affects whether Stable Diffusion will return a face you'd recognize. The image in this case is almost perfect (the black and white picture) except for the eyebrows which were short and straight on the real person.

[SeVeNeVeS]

Ive been playing with https://dezgo.com/
Generated with:AbsoluteReality (realistic)
Prompt: nubian/auburn female on a beach
Negative prompt: Cartoon, unrealistic etc etc.

Not perfect but some results on a female face are pretty good.

Spoiler: ShowHide

If I can get the basics to look realistic then its time to experiment with more creative prompts.

[J. Wilhelm]

Ive been playing with https://dezgo.com/
Generated with:AbsoluteReality (realistic)
Prompt: nubian/auburn female on a beach
Negative prompt: Cartoon, unrealistic etc etc.

Not perfect but some results on a female face are pretty good.

Spoiler: ShowHide

If I can get the basics to look realistic then its time to experiment with more creative prompts.

It's not as easy as one might think to get something very specific, because the AI program is also training on people's stereotypes and lack of knowledge as well.

For example, I tried getting a similar result with Brooks' (slightly older) contemporary, the Mexican Flapper, artist and muse, Carmen "Nahui Ollín" Mondragón. The AI refused to give me anything other than a stereotypical Latin American person, in spite of providing a specific name and a specific decade, plus a portrait of Mondragón! Stable Diffusion gave me 20 faces, not one remotely looked like her. You see, Mondragón didn't look like the typical stereotype that people have in the First World have about Latin Americans. The AI ignored the portrait, the decade, and didn't even try to search a face with the name. Instead it looked for people who could be named Carmen according to the public submissions!! In terms of a weighted classification, I guess there aren't enough portraits of Mondragón to overcome the cultural stereotype!

Spoiler: ShowHide

Reference Photos of Carmen Mondragón

The third image did give me a very good picture of an elderly Inca priestess though! 

I'll try again. After all, the software keeps training constantly.

[SeVeNeVeS]

I saw this on BBC news this morning https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65932372

WHY has no fail safe protocol been administered to prevent such things including deep fake porn?  I really dispair sometimes............. Uuuummm, couldnt it be a little obvious that certain people will try and create such images. 

[J. Wilhelm]

Well, I drop a few more artificial intelligence illustrations. Two of them aren't all AI, as I prefer to get the base image and modify it using GIMP. I find that in spite of improvements, it is usually the first AI iteration that does most of the work. Anything missing is best added by hand, and only then can you iterate again using the GIMP image as a base (if at all needed). Subsequent generations of AI images tend to deviate and accumulate errors, even if you instruct the program to be subtle. Those images that contain more work by hand are copyrighted, and the rest that just have touch ups have an attribution license.

Tribute to Nahui Ollin
I finally got this image right. Flux AI + GIMP
(Right click image to view/zoom)

(Click Spoiler for background on this image)

Spoiler: ShowHide

Maria del Carmen Mondragon Valseca, also known as "Nahui Ollin" was a Mexican Flapper, muse, poet and artist in her own right. She was born in Tacubaya Borough, Mexico City in 1894 and was the daughter of a Mexican General, Manuel Mondragon and her Spanish-born mother, Mercedes Valseca. The Mondragons belonged to the Mexican upper classes during a period of history (known as Porfiriato) when Mexican classes were very divided, thanks to a forced industrialization policy imposed by President Porfirio Diaz, which opened the borders to wealthy migrant Europeans, offering them residence and citizenship  in order to exploit Mexico's natural resources and develop Mexico's heavy industry and railways.

From 1898 to 1906  the family moved to Paris, France, where she studied piano, dance and various fine arts. But after their return, in 1910, President Porfirio Diaz was forced to resign and the Mexican Civil War known as "La Revolucion" began, caused by the extreme disparity between the wealthy landowners and the poor working classes. In 1913, the same year when various Mexican Civil War factions marched on Mexico City, she married a Mexican military cadet and she returned to Paris, where she met famous artists such as Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Henri Matisse. Her marriage would not last, however.

After La Revolucion, in 1921, she returned to Mexico City from Spain, and she began to socialize with the intellectual crowd living in Mexico City. No doubt influenced by political ideas in Spain,  she  befriended a cadre of artists, philosophers and left leaning political thinkers, such as Frida Kahlo, Jose Vasconcelos, Xavier Villaurrutia, Dolores del Río, Guadalupe Marín, Tereza Montoya, Tina Modotti, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lupe Vélez and Salvador Novo.

Always a troublemaker, she adopted the hedonistic lifestyle of a 1920s Flapper, and for 5 years she was involved romantically with Gerardo Murillo, a controversial and excentric " renaissance man" who was a professor,  vulcanologist, philosopher, historian, and artist. He was an admirer of Aztec civilization and adopted the Nahuatl name "Dr. Atl" from the word for "water." Dr. Atl  took her as his personal muse, naming her "Nahui Ollin" ("Eternal Movement").

A very large number of portraits and drawings of Nahui Ollin were drawn by Dr. Atl. Besides her scandalous lifestyle rubbing elbows with the literatti of the era, she was known for wearing an unusual blond bobbed haircut with two long pigtails in the back of her head - in the Native Mexican style.

Tribute to Nahui Ollin 2

The Mexican Modernism of Barragan and Legorreta: Native Futurism

(Click spoiler for background on this image)

Spoiler: ShowHide

Mexico is a true paradise for architects and modernist designers, and especially the high altitude dry regions of Central Mexico that benefit from a relatively mild climate. Together with lower manufacturing costs relative to First World countries, it's possible to design buildings and houses in a modernist style without having to worry about weather-proofing the structure. The buildings can be larger, and more Avant Garde. Mexico's native past with thousands of years of stone masonry tradition also help to influence modernist design and literally paint a more natural futuristic vision.

The end result is a cornucopia of modernist buildings unlike anything you'll see elsewhere around the globe. 20th. century architects, such as Luis Barragan and Ricardo Legorreta imbued life into dry, brutalist buildings by borrowing a palette of primary colors inherited from the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. Bright marigold, fuchsia and purple surfaces balance the white and terracotta floors to pull the building into the 21st. century and beyond.

Polanco Never Looked So Glamorous

[J. Wilhelm]

La Calavera Catrina

Click on spoiler for background on this image

Spoiler: ShowHide

Who is La Catrina? This enigmatic character, "La Calavera Catrina" ("The Dapper Skull") started life as a political cartoon created by Mexican printmaker and lithographer José Guadalupe Posada between 1910 and 1912. The cartoon was created at a time during a period of history (known as Porfiriato) when Mexican classes were very divided, thanks to a forced industrialization policy imposed by President Porfirio Diaz, which opened the borders to wealthy migrant Europeans, offering them residence and citizenship in order to exploit Mexico's natural resources and develop Mexico's heavy industry and railways.

A tremendous class disparity grew among Mexicans because people who were directly associated with this industrial movement, including these new European-born Mexican citizens became very wealthy, while the poorer classes became extremely poor, particularly the Native Mexican farmers around the country. Eventually in 1910 Porfirio Diaz was forced to resign, and an insurrection started among the farmers, which turned into Mexico's Civil War ("La Revolucion").

The well-to-do, Europeanized their looks to match the new class of wealthy migrants, and Mexican women adopted the latest Parisian fashions to match, and rode in their new-fangled automobiles, in a way that mirrored the westernization of Japan during the Meiji Era. Wealthy people lived and pretended to be European in Mexico City, while the poor starved in the fields.

It's in this civil war climate that Posada made his political cartoon critiquing wealthy Mexican women in 1912, basically stating graphically that his "Dapper Skull" mirrored the women who "could dress as elegantly as they wished, but in the end they'd succumb to death as all the rest of us."

However, as part of the Day of the Dead celebrations, it is customary to write friendly poetic epithets (similar to roasting in English) in the form of obituaries called "Calaveras Literarias" ("Literary Skulls"), and other people with a political bone to pick reused Posada's image in the form of editorial broadsides written for the Day of the Dead (1917), in a similar form to these "obituaries," and not necessarily aimed at the upper classes, so there are many examples of this character being used during La Revolucion (1910-20) as political ammunition.

Other artists borrowed the character and La Catrina appeared in art exhibitions. Eventually, through repetition by way of artists like Jean Charlot and Diego Rivera, La Calavera Catrina slowly became a symbol of the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Another Calavera Catrina

Homage: Portrait of Frida Kahlo

Click on spoiler for background on this image

Spoiler: ShowHide

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Born in what is now the Coyoacán Borough of Mexico City, she was the daughter of Carl Wilhelm "Guillermo" Kahlo, a famous Lithuanian-German photographer who emigrated to Mexico, and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Purepecha Native Mexican descent, which in a sense makes her very representative of what was happening demographically in Mexico due to mass immigration in the two decades around the turn of the century.

Frida was Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy, in a style that's often described as surrealist .

Perhaps due to the environment her father worked in, Frida rubbed elbows with the artistic and literatti crowds in Mexico City and later around the world. She met and had a tumultuous marriage with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She also had a long standing association with socialist political circles, perhaps due to her relationship with Diego Rivera. She was part of the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity.

Kahlo has also been described as a magical realist, especially in her latter years due to her often tortuous and abstract illustration of the many ailments she suffered from, including, the effects of polio as a child, and complications from severe injuries she sustained in a car accident in her youth. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

While she was always known in Mexico and artistic circles in New York and Paris (The Louvre purchased one of her paintings), especially after the 1940s, she was "rediscovered" in the United States in the 1970s, and was adopted as a symbol of the "Chicano" Mexican-American experience in the US.

Elsewhere around the world, Frida also became an icon of Mexican culture, Feminism, and a representative of Indigenous traditions. By the 1980s her image could be said to have acquired cult status.

Frida passed away in Mexico in 1954 at the age of 47.