Frazetta and AI
Midjourney and AI imaging has now made it so that each past artist is like a paint brush to choose from when creating an image. Now I can add a little Monet with some Rembrant an a touch of Kandinsky. Well actually never tried that, but would make a great experiment! What I have found is that one of my favorite artist fails as a prompt by himself but is awesome as an extra pinch of seasoning. That artist is Frazetta.
Frazetta blew my mind when I stumbled upon his first book at a bookstore in the 1970s. My edition was tattered and pieces after a while. The paintings ignited my imagination and they were my workbooks for art education learning light, composition, color palettes etc. Sure I used other books like Burne Hogarth anatomy books, but Frazetta made learning a passion.
I was so swept way that by t he time I was 17 I was publishing a fanzine on his work and others related to him.
Thus when Midjourney came out, I was excited to see if I could reproduce some of Frazetta’s classic paintings and start to create my own compositions.
I was so swept way by Frazetta, that by the time I was 17 I was publishing a fanzine on his work and others related to him.
Here are some gorgeous examples of Frazetta’s work
Here is an example of how Frazetta influenced my photography. The photograph in the middle is my photo that I made without thinking about Frazetta, but having grown up on Frazetta it’s easy to see the influence. All the other images around the photo are Frazetta paintings. When I ran google image search , the first image that came up was the Frazetta painting on the top left.
Image in the middle is a photo I took that is clear influenced my Frazetta
Midjourney does a pretty kitch interpretation of Frazettas “Swamp Demon” to the left
My first attempts turned out quite kitch. Frazetta has a kitch side and as a loyal fan it pained me to see that was all Midjourney could output.
When I started adding other artists , I started getting better results
All three of the following started with a seed image . The two on the left used “painted by frazetta and john singer sargent and dean cornwell” and the one on the right only Frazetta
Nov 6, 2022:
Some other images from v3 using just text prompts with a mix of artists
for inspiration, check out Arimontoken
He uses a wonderful mix of old artists
Using v3, for example the middle images is “autumn glow, Painting by dean cornwell and Jeremy Lipking, and ramon casas and john singer sargent and anders zorn and audrey kawasaki, epic composition, realistic faces, beautiful fantasy”
