MAY 2022 | ISSUE NO.5
PIXELZINE
NEW PATHWAYS TO CO-CREATION COVER ART BY TACO
02 At the Helm of Co-Creation 03 How to Create a Series 06 Doorways to Anywhere
PIXELZINE
ISSUE
5 10 Facing Our Fears 13 Paint the Town Red Zine edited by Bot Ross Blue Art by Taco from the Fear Series
1
AT THE HELM OF CO-CREATION Dear Pixelheads, We've become old-hands at creating in series and in Imaginarium - and now, it's time for the community to author their own series. As anyone who participated in our last art quest will tell you, creating a series is a very different creative task. It requires
technical
and
imaginative
thinking of the many directions a series could take and the basis for what makes a good one. In these pages, we hear from Pixelmind's core
series
creators:
Wxll,
our
Art
Director, on the fundamentals, and Adam B. Levine, who does a deep dive into how he formulated "Doorways to Anywhere." We also learn from the creators who made the two most popular series in our Pixel Art Quest, FoMoArigato with the winning "Fear" series, and Wintermute with the runner-up "Graffiti." These are insightful accounts that show just how many routes there are to crafting a series! Excited to see your series to come, Bot Ross Blue
Pixelzine | 2
Words by Bot Ross Blue Artwork by Number48 in "Fear" by FoMoArigato
FROM PIXELMIND'S ART DIRECTOR:
HOW TO CREATE A SERIES By Wxll Series Images from "Centre of the Universe" It has been said that art can be judged objectively with the following three questions: 1. What is the artist trying to say? 2. Do they say it? 3. Was it worth saying? When making these questions guide you to something that looks cool but powerful statement.
a series can help creating not only makes a artistic
Begin with deciding what you want to say, or what idea you want to explore and work from there. When you make a series, you are creating a Pixelzine | 3
framework that lets other people express their individual point of view within the context of your artistic vision. Broad concepts are a good place to start. You are making a mad lib that will be translated into a visual language in partnership with other creators, so you want to build something that allows for a wide range of expressions based around your concept. When it comes to the look of your series the possibilities are endless so think about artistic styles that reflect what you are trying to say.
When the visual style of your series matches the concept of your message the power of your artistic statement is multiplied. Explore unique combinations of art movements (expressionist, vaporwave, Art Nouveau), artistic techniques (oil painting, ink illustration, chalk pastel) and artist names in your prompt. Using combinations of artist names is a great way to develop your signature look by nudging your work with artistic influences. An important technical part of your series to consider is the init image . A good init image can influence the composition of your series in meaningful ways.
Pixelzine | 4
Experiment with the number of skip_timesteps to find something that allows for a range of outputs while gently directing those outputs. I find that 12-24 is a good range to explore. Once you find a good general prompt with the default settings you can make small adjustments to fine tune your outputs. When testing your series, you will want to explore many possible [USER_INPUT] to make sure that a wide range of ideas come across clearly. Try to put yourself in other people’s shoes and explore ideas outside of your normal point of view. Make sure to have fun and explore! This is the way.
You are making a mad lib that will be translated into a visual language in partnership with other creators. WXLL
Pixelzine | 5
D O O R W A Y S T O A N Y W H E R E b y
A d a m
B .
L e v i n e
While many Pixelmind series offer new, distinct styles in which any subject can be explored, I’ve always found myself attracted to more specific forms of co-creation. My series “Doorways to Anywhere”, launched on February 11th, 2022 but by that point had been in development for more than three months. The original idea was inspired by our early experiments with Guided Diffusion. Simply typing in “The Doorway to Universal Truth and Galactic Meaning, abstract, trending on artstation” in November of 2021 yielded jaw dropping results and the seed of the series was planted as I explored variations on the phrase.
Pixelzine | 6
But while the results were stunning, one thing quickly became clear - The placement of the door itself, whether it was open or closed and many other critical details were all over the place. The same prompting phrase (“The doorway to geothermal hot springs and dwimmercraft” for the images above) would generate a great door and then the next create a door standing alone in a pool of geothermal water! Variety is good but it was too much. I needed a starting point, and more importantly I wanted to see what was beyond the doorway, not just look at the door itself. I needed a way to tie the series together and give co-creators the best possible chance of creating something amazing, every time. To accomplish this, I started looking around my favorite copyright-free image sources, namely Unsplash.com. There, I found a wide variety of images which would fit the bill, providing structure that would create some uniformity in how each creation would develop, while leaving plenty of room for an individual's creativity to shine through.
Pixelzine | 7
I tried starting from many photos in my hunt for structure but eventually settled on an image by Rowan Freeman, taken from inside an arched stone doorway looking out at the Italian countryside. The image had much to recommend it. The doorway was apparent in silhouette with strong, colorful details and lots of complexity that would be interpreted by the AI in different ways each time, while keeping the overall “thing-ness” of the piece consistent. But the most important factor was the lighting on the rough-hewn stone floor. When working from a starting image, light and shadow are arguably more important than any other element of an image. When tuned with the appropriate number of skip_timesteps (I eventually settled on 35), the AI tends to adapt the rough texture
Pixelzine | 8
and lighting to any given prompt, adding significant perceived realism to the resulting creation So I had my starting point and the series began to come together, but I found myself frustrated by the not-infrequent occurrence of closed doors, and even when the doorways were open I found the tall, narrow image to limit what could be seen on the other side. I wanted to see more. After much experimentation, I did the easy thing that I actually expected to be wrong. I squished the image in series settings. While the starting image itself was about 1050 pixels tall by 750 pixels wide, I simply increased the width of the images that would be produced to 1050. So I was using a starting image that was taller than it was wide, but I was using it to produce images which were perfect squares.
This approach kept all the things I really liked about the starting image but by widening the door, I was able to see more on the other side and achieve my broader goals. This completely eliminated any closed-door generations and emphasized the truly unique element of each cocreation, which is not the door itself but the location it takes you to. Now I had a series that would allow you to travel to Dracula’s castle, the surface of an alien planet, a Japanese tea garden in the 1800s, balmy Pinecrest Florida, the Taj Mahal or really any place. That’s the magic of creation with AI. You often don’t know exactly where you’re going, or even how to get there, but the combination of curiosity, technology and perseverance can take you anywhere you can imagine.
Pixelzine | 9
FACING OUR FEARS It's an honor to be chosen as the first artist for the Pixel Art Quest series by the community! Thank you. For this contest, I played around with a few ideas, but none seemed to go in the direction I hoped (either they were inconsistent or not varied enough). So, I went back to the drawing board and thought about some of my favorite series to date: the masks and dreams series. The mask generations had such variety in both tangible and intangible materials - and the dreams conceptually worked on both personal and
universal
levels,
which
drew
out
introspection for the user. With this, I defined what I wanted this series to be: 1. Personal to the user. 2. Could be used with a wide range of user inputs, from literal to abstract or simple to complex. 3. Would draw out some introspection, and that was personal and common to all people.
Pixelzine | 10
Words by FoMoArigato Artwork from "Fear" by Kanard, Number48 and BlamBlam
What keeps you up at night? Cherry blossom tree consumed by the inferno by BlamBlam
Fear came to mind. We all have fears – some in common, and some unique to us. Snakes and spiders, falling in love, heights, public speaking, or even the color, yellow. What may seem silly (i.e., balloons), to one person may be terrifying to another. Or terrifying to all (i.e., clowns). To develop the prompt, I looked for some artists’ styles I thought would complement the series and added them to the prompt (for example, Caspar David Freidrich and Jonas Burgert). I had to go back in forth with a couple different ideas but overall, the results came out with what I had envisioned. Pixelzine | 11
Along with greed, fear is one of the strongest motivators in our daily lives. Fear based motivation is not always bad. However, it is often used by marketers, politicians, corporations, etc., to get us to act in a way they want. And we as a world have had no shortage of fear in the last 2-3 years.
Maybe by naming and facing those fears we can no longer be afraid.
I have no doubt Pixelmind will be able to take a task like this and churn out images beyond what we could have wanted and will surprise (or scare) us in some amazing ways. I am thrilled to see what some of your greatest fears are when put through Pixelmind. And maybe by naming and facing those fears we can no longer be afraid.
FOMOARIGATO
What keeps you up at night? A rush of water flooding a medieval castle by ReconWorstLegacy
What keeps you up at night? Flames mirror funhouse by TacoBytez Pixelzine | 12
LESSONS FROM CREATING THE SERIES 'GRAFFITI'
PAINT THE TOWN RED By Wintermute Artwork by Wintermute
Pixelzine | 13
For this Series 5 Quest, we had the opportunity to craft our own series for Pixelmind Pass Holders - a celebration of community and creativity again coming together from the team at Pixelmind. As a community driven experience engine (a crafting suite of tools) playing with Pixelmind feels like you are exploring and emphasizing a specific artistic subculture. Graffiti is also such a medium - a subculture expression brought to the life in the streets we live and love. I wanted the two metaverses to collide in real life and in our imagination, mixing and forming an experience for others to play in a stylistic framework. What follows is three steps to getting the series you want. NOMADIC
|
24
Step 1: Brainstorm To start the process, you need an idea. Choosing the Graffiti artists such as Banksy, Lady Pink, Mr Brainwash and MadC was the inspirational direction for the Series submitted - Street Grime.
Step 3: Style refinement loop Once you have the kind of style and basic outcome you like it’s time to use the dial and levers of refinement in the advanced options.
It’s both a play on how Graffiti can be associated with criminality, and sometimes derided as 'not Art.' This series shows it as expressionism in situ.
Depending on the outcome you want crisper, cleaner, blurry, gradients. I tweaked one dial at a time going in increments to produce a lot of variations until a consistent outcome I loved could be applied.
Step 2: Ideate and Play Adding a story prompt then adding reference images and adding them to Imaginarium for the framework view used in processing – I uploaded a picture with a street including vanishing points - giving a shape guide.
The target of a series is to have a user input prompt, that when applied reproduces stylistic content consistent in outcome. When the series come out, have a play graffiti / tag your favorite places for the love of freedom and form.
Pixelzine | 14