Moving Pixels vs Moving Vertices vs Prompting

The Beauty of the House is immeasureable, its Kindness infinite. 
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

This was a fun quick read. I really liked this scene when cracks started to appear in Piranesi's reality when his journal entries didn't match his memory. I think we all have that moment in our lives when what we thought was the truth, isn't, and we need something to hold on to. Something rock solid. For Piranesi, it's his statues, but in light of the new truths, even the statues seem to have a different meaning...

As always, I start in Blender to create a base image:

I started learning Blender because I wanted to make illustration. Except, using evee or cycles, the ray tracing looks very 3d... I did explore a lot of NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) and also tried grease pencil but the only thing harder than drawing in 2d was drawing in 3d! The easiest option was to do a paintover in 2d after rendering an image. Something I see a lot concept artist do.

A couple years ago, everyone was talking about Mid Journey and AI image generation. I first I thought it was pretty useless. How do I use words to get the image I want? It’s impossible. But I found a site called Leonardo AI and I was able to upload my own images as my prompt. Hmmm, I might be able to use this. So I started use Leonardo AI and also Fooocus to do the renderings:

Working between Blender and Clip Paint, Sometimes, it's easier to move a pixel than a vertex and vice versa. Now I have a third option, let AI move the pixels or even create the pixels. I usually have to scroll through a lot of stock images to find background images or even for ideas. But now I can let AI create the image I’m looking for. Here's the background I thought worked best:

After some photoshopping and back and forth I'm closer:

I do some inpainting along along with manual touch ups on the back ground statues:

Then it's final details and touch up with correction layers. I realized he should have his messenger bag so I painted that. AI could not get that finger on the statue so I just painted that finger as well. And sometimes, it’s just faster to do it yourself.