6. Paints, Painters and Mixing Artists
6.1 Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
6.2 Other painters
6.3 Mixing artists
6.4 Pitfalls of Using Classical Painters
6.1 Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Before we talked about William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Well this artist isn't a digital artist by any means. They're an oil painter. In-fact, most of these artists actually work using oils and acryllics. Using traditional paints in our prompts has some disadvantages when it comes to fantastical elements. However, there's often a huge quality boost when you add medium and active year to the artist. For instance, consider our friend Bouguereau:
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed
Just LOOK at those. We've most certainly moved away from our fantasy style but we still have something with horns and now we're getting a LOT of detail and symmetry. You'll notice some interesting aspects of this prompt. We've gotten rid of "trending in artstation" and now we curiously have the year. Otherwise the prompt is mostly unchanged. The year is actually there to make the prompt seem a bit more like the description you would see in a painting gallery. Of course this is just my hypothesis for why this works well. We can't be sure without a whole lot more testing.
below are some other iterations which still look nice, but worse to me.
prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, oil painting, highly detailed
prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, oil painting, highly detailed
prompt 3: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, highly detailed
6.2 Other painters
6.2.1 John William Waterhouse
6.2.2 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
6.2.3 Lawrence Alma-Tadema
6.2.4 Frank Frazetta
6.2.5 Michael Whelan
6.2.1 John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse regularly depicted greek and arthurian legends. A painter in the Pre-Raphaelite era, Waterhouse was a master of complex and colorful art reminiscent of the Italian renaissance. His subjects often take on interesting poses and costuming.
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by John William Waterhouse, 1909, fantasy, highly detailed
Note the interesting poses and the forlorn faces! The quality is definitely not as good here though. This could be the quality of the images used in the dataset or it could have to do with the brushstrokes. It's hard to say without more extensive testing.
6.2.2 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French neoclassical artist who considered himself a painter of history. His clothing is often exquisitely detailed. With Ingres his painting subjects actually changed with time. Earlier he studied under different artists and his style was a little less interesting. You can amazingly see this by shifting the year used in the prompt. See below!
in order:
prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1800, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1827, fantasy, highly detailed
Notice how ugly our tieflings get! This may have to do with the fact that Ingres did more portraiture later in his career. He was often very faithful to the look of those subjects.
6.2.3 Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Alma-Tadema was a Dutch painted that moved to England in 1870. He was considered the most famous Victorian painter. His subjects were often of classical antiquity. They are often elegantly dressed and set in background full of vibrant colors.
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1893, fantasy, highly detailed
We get some truly exquisite outfits from Alma-Tadema and some great looking faces. If you were to look at a picture of Alma-Tadema's work, e.g. A coign of vantage, you might wonder why the backgrounds here are not so vibrant. The answer appears to be that it's from the phrase "oil painting". In order to bring out the color you'll need to specify "vibrant colors" We'll go over more on that in the last section.
6.2.4 Frank Frazetta
Surprise! Frazetta is actually a master oil painter. His fantasy subjects were macho and sexy, but so are the subjects of most classical artists!
prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed
With Frazetta our subjects become solidly fantasy and much more macho. Look at the pecks on #2! We get some interesting face paints on #1 as well. It's hard to say what year will work best with Frazetta but a majority of his works seem to be in 73. You may find other years you like though.
6.2.5 Michael Whelan
Fricken double surprise! Whelan is a master of Acrylic! As we've talked about before, Whelan is hands down the best artist for anything dungeons and dragons related. You'll see this with his colorful results. Modern fantasy painters are more used to colorful skin tones. Whelan mainly uses Acrylic but his earlier paintings sometimes used a mix of Acrylic and oils.
Prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, Oils and Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
Notice that we get a lot more cohesion with just Acrylics. Acrylics are also a lot better at getting vibrant colors!
6.3 Mixing Painters
William-Adolphe Bouguereau gave some truly excellent results. But what if we wanted to mix him with something else? Let's consider a Tiefling warrior this time and try mixing him with Frazetta and Whelan.
6.3.1 William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta
prompt 1: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 2: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 3: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 4: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed
This is a matrix of attempts between year and artist order. Subjectively I would conclude from these that in a prompt that uses two artists and the year, the thing that produces the best quality closes to a given Artist A mixed with a given artist B is "[paint type] painting by [artist A] and [artist B], [year A]" where year A is the active year of artist A. However, this is all subjective so feel free to change that formula however you like. I will be moving forward with this formula though.
6.3.2 William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta
prompt 1: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 2: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, Oils and Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 3: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
prompt 4: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed
Here we try a couple other iterations of Whelan just to check out how it looks in combination with Bouguereau. In my opinion Oils and Acrylics looks best. However oil painting also looks quite nice. Consider Acrylics if you want to get some more fantasy colored skin tones. Notice the chalky white skin tone in #2 of prompt 1?
6.4 Pitfalls of Using Classical Painters
You may have noticed something about a majority of the classical painters I listed here: everyone is white.... This is just what most of these painters painted. However that training is so strong it becomes difficult to overide:
prompt: A blue tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed
Blue has been applied to everything here in Dall-e's attempt to understand what the heck an blue tiefling could be here.
--------------------------------- 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.