Tieflings are our next d&d creature. In-case you're not familiar with a tiefling, they are a race in d&d which have skin colored in hues of reds and purples and often have some kind of demonic-esk horns. D&D states that this race has "infernal" heritage.
This is the second creature that dall-e knows fairly well. This won't be as extensive as the goblin guide. We'll just be going variations, the pitfalls with tiefling horns, pitfalls with tiefling tails, and additional artists that you might consider using for Tieflings.
Table of contents
Types of Tieflings
Artists
Hair and Hats
Skin coloring
Tails
Paints, Painters and Mixing Artists
Bringing it all together
1. Variations
In this section we'll be comparing Tieflings with Devils and Demons. These should all look similar and Devils and Demons will provide some tougher looking creatures for you if you'd like a more severe looking character.
Let's start with what we learned from before but leave out the artist for now:
1.1 Tieflings
1.2 Devils
1.3 Demons
1.1 Tieflings
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Here we get some fairly bog standard tieflings. They all look somewhat menacing but also slightly pretty? So we're spot on! Note that #1 has some extra horns in places. Dall-e generally has trouble figuring out where to put non-human parts. With Tieflings you may sometimes have to reroll to get the horns in the right place.
1.2 Devils
prompt: A devil, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Devils look tougher than tieflings and ANGRIER! One of them is red skinned like a traditional devil would be in popular culture. Consider a devil for if you want an imposing looking tiefling.
1.3 Demons
prompt: A demon, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
We may have over corrected with this one....#2 and #3 are forces of pure evil. You may want to avoid demons... unless you want a BBEG tiefling, then you can have at it.
2. Artists
As we saw previously, the artist can be very important for getting the right look. Tieflings are much more human looking than goblins and we'll be introducing and MIXING in some classical artists that are particularly good at human paintings. The artists we'll be addressing are:
2.1 Larry Elmore
2.2 Frank Frazetta
2.3 Michael Whelan
2.4 John Williams Waterhouse
2.5 William-Adolphe Bouguereau
2.1 Larry Elmore
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Larry Elmore, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Larry Elmore is a classic fantasy artist. Here we get some very good looking tieflings. #1 has some extra horns but who doesn't need more of those right? You'll notice on #2 and #3 we get something that almost looks like a scifi helmet. This is common for dall-e 2 generated tieflings. You'll find that you need to manually specify that tieflings have hair on their heads to get rid of that. But please just DONT give them hats...you'll see why.
2.2 Frank Frazetta
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Frank Frazetta, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Frazetta produces some VERY manly looking tieflings. Look at the chin on #2! That's what Gaston would look like if 2 of his 4 dozen eggs had been infused with infernal blood. #2 has our first case of what I like to call whoopsy horns - when the horns face in strange directions. Just a quirk of dall-e I'm afraid. Consider Frazetta when for all your strong-person needs.
2.3 Michael Whelan
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Michael Whelan also produces some good looking Tieflings. #4 may have gazelle horns! We'll be using Whelan is our fantasy winner (not the only winner though) moving forward. We'll keep elmore around just to see how he does for certain things.
Just for fun let's see what Whelan does to devils:
prompt: A devil, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Neat! #2 is some sort of handsome, dracula blue demon. #4 is way less evil than the others. Almost wise looking. Definitely consider Devil for Whelan when you're looking for a warlock or a tough druid.
2.4 John William Waterhouse
prompt: A devil, portrait shot, by John William Waterhouse, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
John Williams Waterhouse is our first classical artist. I thought it would be nice to try him out since he tends to focus on greek mythology and that's pretty fantasy as far as the art world is concerned. Classical artists risk making your pictures less fantasy though. We see this with #3 where our horns have left us! Also the others all have whoopsy horns.
2.5 William-Adolphe Bouguereau
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
William-Adolphe Bouguereau is a master of painting human figures and on dall-e he gives absolutely exquisite results. Notably his paintings are often of woman and so we get some fairly handsome men here. We'll be revisiting Bouguereau later in this post when we talk more about mediums other than digital art. Note that Dall-e gets a little confused on #4. This is atypical for Bouguereau when it comes to straight oil painting prompts. Either digital art or bad luck is playing against us here.
Moving forward we'll be going with Michael Whelan as our example artist but in this case all options are valid - though you should be careful with using ONLY classical painters as you may find yourself moving away from
3. Hair and hats
It You may have noticed that most of these Tieflings are balding or bald! You can fix that by adding hair or helmets, but you can't fix it with hats....
3.1 Hair
3.2 Helmets
3.3 Hats
3.1 Hair
prompt: A tiefling with long hair, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
So one of these STILL has a widow's peak but everyone else has lush, glorious locks! Just look at #3 he's ready to challenge you to an electric guitar duel. Notice on #4 we get some whoopsy horns. Anything on the head is likely to cause some destabilization of the horns. Be careful about the type of haircut you ask for!
3.2 Helmets
So hair is fine, what about a helmet?
prompt: A tiefling wearing a medieval helmet, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Helmets work GREAT! probably because helmets normally have horns on them. Don't think TOO hard about these helmets and how they take them on and off.
3.3 Hats
So I've got some pretty bad news for people who want Tieflings with fancy hats....you can't have those:
prompt: A tiefling wearing a top hat, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
As you can see dall-e is now having some...issues. #1 has the hint of horns but #2 highlights the main problem: dall-e doesn't want to put horns on a hat. "Hat's don't have horns!" dall-e protests. I can hear you asking about other hats...well those don't work well either:
prompt: A tiefling wearing a beret, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
These fancy painters ARE NOT tieflings... #3 might be some sort of elf Harley Quinn. Hats are apparently too strong for the weaker concept of horns on Tieflings. Worry not though! Not all is lost.
prompt: A devil wearing a top hat, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
See! you can have a devil in a top hat! There you go. Wipe those tears. Sure most of these are not great...but it's something! But don't even think about editing a tiefling by calling it a devil to get those horns back on. Save your credits. It. won't. work.
4. Skin Coloring
Skin coloring is fairly easy. You just have to describe your tiefling as a [color][tiefling].
Special thanks to user fitsea for testing this idea. They graciously gave me permission to display some of the results here.
prompt: a blue tiefling, portrait shot, by Frank Frazetta, black mohawk, #tiefling, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed
We get some slight decoherence here with #1 but most likely due to the Mohawk and not the color. Not so hard to apply color though! If you want to get the right hair skin color combo you may need to consider which colors normally go together. Here black and white got with blue. That's why all the tieflings have black hair.
Prompt: A blue devil, portrait shot, by Charles Vess, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed
Bonus: a blue devil by Charles Vess. Here the entire devil is blue. Possibly including some specification about hair will change that.
5. Tails
Tails are incredibly hard to get right. Let's look at just a medium shot and let's emphasize the tail.
prompt: female tiefling warlock, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, #tail, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Two of these could be fixed with in paiting easily and the first could perhaps be corrected with some clever editing and prompting. However, it's clear we tails are too dificult for dall-e. You'll need to edit it in and to do that properly you'll need to start with some sort of pose. Let's build a tiefling from an over the shoulder shot.
prompt: female tiefling, over the shoulder shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation
Let's go with #1 here and start editing!
Eventually we get here after some initial editing in an external editing software.
prompt: female tiefling, city background, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation + additional editing
Tip: remove any notion of photography instructions. Don't use "medium shot" or "portrait shot". Just let dall-e do the work. Beware though that the smaller you make the head the more work Dall-e will have to do. This particular edit is not a composite image. I just shrunk the head down and started from there.
You should know....this was INCREDIBLY hard to get. What I found eventually: getting a tail needs some sort of starter tail that makes a visual path towards where you need it to come out of. Also, it helps to say "tail coming out of a tiefling woman" and add in a "#tail" for good measure. Ultimately I would recommend using some sort of editing software to make a starter tail. I'll give an example of this in the final picture I make using what we've learned.
That concludes the lion's hare of what you need to know for tieflings. Next I'll be using Tieflings as an example for using painters.
--------------------------------- Disclaimer:
My personal belief is that AI art should be primarily for enjoyment. Please support art and artists and furthermore write to your senators about protecting the arts through subsidies, tax breaks for working artists and for laws that protect the jobs of artists. It will not be so easy to change the pose of your characters through dall-e. Consider paying an artist for a commission of that character.