The Perils of Prompting and when I tried to follow AI art instructions on YouTube

A personal work of Thurwar and Staxxx from the novel, Chain-Gang All-Star by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

This was a hard book to read. It very violent and deals with justice or injustice or injustice of the justice system. I don't know... It’s satire. When prisoners fight to the death for entertainment, you know it's going to be a tough book.

So I didn't want to do an action scene, because that wouldn't feel right. But the book ends (SPOILER ALERT) with Thurwar and Staxxx two lovers and team mates having to fight their last fight with each other.

Research stage

Let's start with the character pose. I want to pose them in a sort of hugging pose (In the way athletics will hug their teammates after a goal or after winning a game, I mean, killing is a sport in this world). So that was kind of the idea I had as I browsed Pinterest and added image to my pureref board:

From looking at a lot photos of athletics (I was looking at emotions and how it's expressed in the body). The one on the left stood out for me of the football (soccer) players in black and yellow. It looked like they lost.

That was perfect. Because Thurwar and Staxxx are the loser here. The corporation wins. Damn. They always win…

Comp sketch in Blender

So I tried to create something similar in blender, playing with the camera and the angles:

I kitbashed a few main elements, the two characters (using the Human Generator addon) and their weapons. The Jumbotron and the hovering camera thingy (HCU - lets audience get right in the action!) I added later in the process, but you can see it here.

So here's the output in Blender with how I imagined the lighting would be in the arena:

For the background, I went to AI prompting for that. AI can do a lot and can be used in many ways, but I think for most people when they talk about AI art, they're talking about prompting. Type something and BAM get an awesome image. In reality, it doesn't work like that. The worst part of prompting is how hard it is to control and make decisions.

I feel like artmaking is a process and a puzzle. If I prompt something BAM all or a lot the decisions are made for me. Which is kind of annoying because from my own experience, I would do things differently than what the AI choose. Also as an artist, I think every element in the picture needs to serve a purpose. But AI will just spew things out.. Very nice images, but not what I need.

Which is why I work this way, creating the composition in Blender first, I can make the decisions that are important to me and control the elements in the image. But sometimes, I'm happy to prompt because a decisions might not be as important. Like the background here:

I used Leonardo.ai using Leonardo Kino XL with photo real turn on. The prompt: "a futuristic gladiator arena, night, bright lights."

I thought anyone of these could work... But I went with the one with gladiator on the top left.

Rendering stage

I photobashed Staxxx's hair and added the background and inputted this into Leonardo again.