Horkey Chaos! 16 (53?) More Artists In Stable Diffusion AI Art — Plus Scripting
First I discussed 25 artists for one prompt. Then I discussed sixteen more. In my pending directories of artists I have… let me count… 53 more artists. No, uh-uh, that’s too much to cover in detail and neither of us have the energy to get through all of them. So let’s hit the highlights of interesting artists and then discuss scripting to speed creating investigations like this up.
I did a lot of this by hand the hard way. Afterwards I discovered that — of course — there’s a script to let me do it with one click. We’ll cover that after looking at some of these artists. Learn from my pain.
What I will cover here:
- A deep dive into Aaron Horkey,
- An overview of 15 more artists,
- A quick scan of 37 more artists, and
- How to use a script to speed up generating a variety of images.
Here’s a reminder of the one prompt I’m using, switching out the last artist to experiment from artist to artist (aaron horkey in this example):
3D Vivid [handpainted:photograph:0.5] by Norman Rockwell and John Singer Sargent of pretty santa-workshop woman elven goddess, volumetric light, ornate leather dress, aesthetic, menacing, fantasy, chaotic, bokeh, intricately detailed, Symmetry, snowy, wet, Winter, Hyper-Realistic, Ultra Resolution, desolate, southern gothic, 8K, christmas, masterpiece [oil painting:hyperrealism:0.5] in the style of aaron horkey
Another reminder: you’ll see some weird ears because I said “elf” — sometimes beautiful elf ears… sometimes way off.
Aaron Horkey — I LOVE the CHAOS
I think I discovered Aaron Horkey when he was suggested as a related artist in an image search I was doing. I was in a “try anything” mood and I threw Aaron Horkey into my prompt and 💥ka-pow💥 one sock flew off and then 💥ka-pow💥 the second sock flew off. 🧦. I love it.
The way I look at it: it brings in (a) a lot of colorful chaos, (b) feathers, (c) the occasional bird-like creatures, and (d) on rare occasion, a cat. But it’s the colorful chaos I love:
So much that I started playing with the strength-dial on Horkey. Meaning that I put his name into parenthesis with a colon and a number to say how much of the artist to put into the imaging mix. Here’s 0.25 — meaning that I had the text (aaron horkey:0.25) in the prompt:
Here’s 0.50:
Here’s 1.50:
Yeah, that 1.50 is something. I love the strength and the chaos — even at 0.25 there’s an effect. Horkey is my new favorite mix-in. On to other artists.
Michael William Kaluta
Some of these artists — like Michael William Kaluta — result in some A+ crazy compositions, like Mike Mignola and Ayami Kojima from before. Now Kaluta. There’s a lot going on in these images. Probably too much. In the future, I plan to experiment dialing things down here a bit and seeing if some depth-of-field can ever kick-in so that it doesn’t appear to be flat riot of too-much-stuff.
Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
There’s a dreamy, foggy quality to Bastien Lecouffe Deharme images created here. Plus: winner of the first electric guitar I have ever generated. Like the rock-and-roll winter witch queen. Nice 🤘.
Joao Ruas
I like the subjects rendered by using Joao Ruas as the primary artist — the palette isn’t too vivid, leaning into woodland browns and such. But something about the subjects is interesting to me and their body types are a bit unique.
Claire Wendling
I really like the posing and the lighting generated for Claire Wendling’s representative images, but boy did I have to generate a lot to avoid something NSFW. Even with my “no naughty bits” negative prompt… lots of naughty bits. Artistic still and all.
Dustin Nguyen
Smooth and slick is how Dustin Nguyen looks to me. Sometimes the background is flat. But there’s good detail with modern looking subjects.
Guillem H. Pongiluppi
Interesting details and odd head-dressings from Guillem H. Pongiluppi in the prompt. Fairly good detail and modern looks.
Lois van Baarle
Oh Lois van Baarle has brought a cotton-candy machine into image creation here. Lots of rich, vivid colors and a swirly softness to the characters and their environments.
Jenny Frison
Using Jenny Frison as the primary artist resulted in a lot of portrait poses. The color range isn’t as dynamic as some artists here. But the subjects are rendered cleanly with a variety of backgrounds.
Richard Corben
A lot of us know Richard Corben from way back. Like Heavy Metal from long ago. This doesn’t look like his art style much at all but it does end up having interesting compositions and rich colors.
Syd Mead
When I think Syd Mead I think Blade Runner. I didn’t expect Stable Diffusion to kick-out what it did in this circumstance, which looks like the halls of the elites in the 1920s before Wall Street crashed. I was expecting flying cars. Instead, I got Rosebud. Futurist?
Terese Nielsen
If your eyes need to wake up, call up Terese Nielsen. At least in this case. Oversaturated colors and oversaturated subjects. The dial is set to 11 on several somethings.
Landscape Artists Are Going To Landscape
And finally, just some interesting landscape artists who are not going to give in to this foolishness to do portraits (perhaps the occasional token person will appear in their landscape). Consider if you can work them in to adjust the landscape of your image and use other artists for the subjects.
John Howe
Always seems to be a river or a trail going off into the distance here.
Liam Wong
Your cyber-city is all lit up for Christmas.
Martin Deschambault
A few people pop-up here, but the focus is on the town or the forest.
Zdzislaw Beksinski
If I’m not going to heaven, I assume my destination might look like this. All of this.
But Wait, There’s More
A lot more. I’m going to list out some artists that I recently did a big sweep on and either note interesting ones or include some pictures for the super interesting ones. Note that one great reference for artists and seeing their style output by Stable Diffusion continues to be, for me, list of artists for SD v1.4 A-C / D-I / J-N / O-Z (rentry.org)
I started playing around with the prompt for this set — I was more focused on making it look photographic. An example of this is down in the next part talking about scripting. As a result, when I choose a photographer as the primary artist, it’s going to have a more realistic appearance.
Abbott Handerson Thayer — modern looking portraits
Adam Hughes — color rich and a bit exaggerated in the subject’s body.
Adolph Menzel — classical, late 19th century looking subjects.
Albert Joseph Moore — very nice portrait details.
Albert Lynch — detailed yet soft, low contrast subjects.
Alberto Seveso — nice dose of crazy in there. Head colors etc.
Aleksi Briclot — fashion-shoot like photos, some subjects with exotic head dressing.
Alessio Albi — mostly wide-shot results, one portrait with interesting lighting but flat looking.
Alex Prager — uninteresting outside shots but one low-shot medium-distance image that’s intriguing.
Alex Timmermans — really good for photographic level quality. There’s a darkness that I appreciate here.
Alexandr Averin — not super-interesting results for this prompt; kind of flat and normal.
Alfred Stevens — nice classic quality portraiture here. I might try to have one artist for the composition and Stevens for the details.
Alyssa Monks — somewhat disconcerting stares of medium detailed / portrayed subjects.
Andre Kohn — something appeals to me here both in the lighting, the detail, and the color tone used. More Kohn!
Andrea Kowch — I’m surprised this wasn’t more amazing. Super detailed foreboding environments with semi-distraught subjects.
Andrew Atroshenko — classic sort of compositions here — not quite modern.
Andrew Loomis — nothing stands out for this prompt — sometimes flat sometimes color rich.
Andrew Robinson — as well, nothing remarkable for this prompt.
Andrew Wyeth — exceptionally beautiful long-shots — no portraits here! But amazing colors.
Android Jones — holy smokes — crazy colors and crazy this and crazy that. Fun stuff w/ Mr. Jones.
Anka Zhuravleva — wow, nice photographic compositions here. Subjects look modern and a bit fantastical.
Anna Bocek — super-color-saturated portraits in a broad-stroke / gouache style.
Anne Dewailly — very detailed faces and detailed clothes / dressings.
Edward John Poynter — classical detailed but not too depthful looking portraits.
Jean-Baptiste Monge — interesting and crisp looking subjects with some fantastical details.
Jeremy Lipking — Some portraits of photographic quality with dream-like surroundings.
John Everett Millais — detailed portraits, not exciting in their posing.
Malcolm Liepke — colorful and tanned looking subjects.
Marco Mazzoni — a little colorful and a little crazy.
Ray Caesar — some portraits that are interesting, some outside wide shots that aren’t.
Raymond Swanland — interesting compositions with some fantastical pushed in there. Detailed subjects and interesting light / tonal controls.
Rembrandt — very detailed and very fixed on painting Santa over and over again. Very detailed with great facial lighting.
Richard S. Johnson — not great — oversatured colors and uninteresting environments with warped / twisted bodies.
Shepard Fairey — holy smokes what frog did I just lick? And can I have another lick?
Thomas Benjamin Kennington — wow, wow, wow — I love the portrait detailing here. The skin is so smooth — definitely an artist I’ll use in the future, either as primary or secondary.
Vittorio Matteo Corcos — very detailed but not great compositions.
Yuumei — NICE! I like these compositions and how it comes together with the 2nd and 3rd artists.
Wanting To Be Lazy — Running Scripts
I use the Automatic1111 web-ui environment for running Stable Diffusion locally.
I was reading through the list of highlighted user scripts (Custom Scripts · AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui Wiki (github.com)) and the very first one I read about, “Improved prompt matrix” sounded fantastic. I grabbed the Python file and put it into my scripts directory and restarted everything.
What it lets me do: rather than doing one primary artist at a time, generating images, and then editing the primary artist to generate the next set I can now give the whole list of artists I’m interested in and click “Generate” and let it work through the list, uninterrupted. Here’s an example prompt:
Prompt:
3D Vivid color photograph by Mike Mignola and Simon Bisley and Aaron Horkey of beautiful Santa-workshop woman elven goddess, eyes open, volumetric light, ornate leather dress, aesthetic, menacing, fantasy, chaotic, bokeh, intricately detailed, Symmetry, snowy, wet, Winter, Hyper-Realistic, Ultra Resolution, desolate, southern gothic, 8K, Christmas, masterpiece hyperrealism photo in the style of <adolph menzel|Albert Joseph Moore|Albert Lynch|Alexandr Averin|alfred stevens|andrei markin|Andrew Loomis|andrew robinson|Andrew Wyeth|anna bocek|Anne Dewailly>, 24mm Canon 5D
So that’s eleven artists within the less-than and the greater-than, separated by vertical bars. And I want batch of four so, as it notes on the command line when I hit “Generate”, I’m going to get 44 images. Interesting things I note:
- You get 4 batches of the 11 artists.
- The same seed is used in each batch.
I guess using the same seed is good for comparison… but bad for variety. Before I’d have 44 seeds and some interesting things would pop out. Now it’s just 4 seeds for a batch of 4. If you have image magick installed you can do a command like the following in a directory with the 44 images to create a comparison image:
magick montage -geometry +0+0 -tile 11x4 *.png montage.jpg
You aren’t limited to using the <x|y|z> expression in just one place in your prompt. You can use it in multiple places in your prompt and it will ensure every unique iteration of all the combinations is generated. So I could switch out the secondary artists in addition to the primary, or try them at various strength factors, or change the environment from winter to summer to spring. It’s only limited by your imagination, time, and the space of your hard-drive.
So if you want to do a big experiment before bed, load up lots of expressions and kick it off and see what the results are when you wake up. There might be some diamonds amidst all those travesties of fingers and arms.
All these script warrant more investigation, in addition to getting beyond artist investigations and being more prompt creative. Until next time.
