This is another post inspired by Midjoyrney’s daily theme. This time the theme was “swamp“. I prompted for an elf in leather armour approaching a sinister swamp fortress and the pale moon glowing through the mist.

The AI mostly ignored the elf part, and the armour could be lighter. Also, it often misplaced the weapon in the character’s hand. Other issues were inconsistent shadows or reflections and the moon not being perfectly round. Overall, I was satisfied with the dark fantasy look and atmosphere and did not try to refine the protagonist further. The images have been retouched in DxO PhotoLab.

The scene could be from a game, so I tried pixel art style next. The first attempt did not work out well. While the images had a pixel art vibe, they looked upscaled and blurred. Instead of iterating on the prompt, I decided to fix the images in Affinity Photo. I tested resizing and pixelate distortion effect. Pixelate gave the best result, although resizing with Lanczos 3 Separable resampling was also good.

Earlier, I had watched Olivio Sarikas’ video about theme infusion and decided to test that. I infused fortresses 1 and 2 with cyberpunk, 80s b-movie and Sierra adventure game pixel art themes. Swamp and cyberpunk did not result in an interesting combination, but the 80s theme was better. Pixel art felt like an adventure game screen but still had the same problem as earlier. Again this was fixed with Affinity Photo. Finally, I infused fortress 3 with autumn, winter and pastel themes.

Working in the crowded channel can be frustrating. Still I wanted to generate all the images in the public channel instead of DMs or private server. It is fun to see what others are creating, and I have setup a collection to find my images easily.