Multidimensional Summoning

At noon, the ancient stones of Stonehenge glowed with the sun's warmth and cast long shadows over the desert landscape. A group of wandering mages had set up a temporary camp nearby, hoping to unlock the hidden power within the stones. After many days of meditation and prayers, they finally triggered a bright beam of light that erupted from the circle's center, piercing the sky and forming a colorful vortex in the distant clouds. The mages gasped in a mix of awe and fear, as a colossal being emerged from the opening in the clouds. Their prayers had been answered, but they did not know if the godlike creature from another world would be their ally or their ultimate doom.

Affinity Photo Workflow: A few image prompts using Bing DALL-E, Meta AI Imagine, and Nightcafe Image AI to help create portions of the monster, a lot of cloud images, and the desert valley. Vapor clouds, the sun, sunburst beams, and the summoning beams were added by hand in Affinity Photo. Eyeballs created using Filter Forge were added to the creature. Stone circles and tribal tents were pulled from images and masked in.

Hi-rez image link [2492px wide]

Nrub'atocto Trapped Below the Surface

Some new artwork to go with the previous Nrub'atocto - She Who Feeds storyline showing the entity still trapped below ground.

Affinity Photo Workflow: A few image prompts using Bing DALL-E to help create monsters and portions of the cave.  Masked in the supporting creatures (corners) and fallen stones from public-source other images.  Merged in vapor clouds, edge wraps, and parchment text story all within Affinity Photo.

Hi-rez image link [3000px tall]

and here is another quick image

The Ashes of Cthulhu

Cthulhu rises from the blood-soaked river and approaches those who mistakenly summoned him.

Affinity Workflow: A couple Meta AI Image prompts until I found two creatures I could combine (body + wings).  Water was textured then HSL adjusted to look like blood, mist effects, streaks, ashes added within Affinity.

Hi-rez image link [2727px tall]

Zatanna Zatara repels her attackers

Zatanna Zatara stood tall as the four men taunted her, threatening trouble. With a carefully phrased backward casting ward and a wave of her hands, she summoned a pair of sparkling spiral shields to repel her attackers.

Hi-rez image link [3489px wide]

Thóthchånge Awakens

A small group of science-based cultists, devoted to the worship of a primordial leviathan, have devised a plan to unleash their god Thóthchånge from his prison beneath the lunar surface. They have uncovered a Stonehenge-like formation located only a few kilometers from Apollo 15's original landing site near Mare Imbrium. They intend to use the arcane stones as a casting circle and perform a dark ritual during a solar eclipse when the Moon is aligned with the Sun and the Earth. They hope that by doing so, they will create a rift in the deep regolith, and awaken Thóthchånge from his slumber who will reward them with dark enigmatical powers. However, their slumbering leviathan does not grant rewards, it lives only to consume... **everything**.

Affinity Photo Workflow: A few image prompts using Bing DALL-E, and Nightcafe ImageAI to get me four different monsters to chop, crop, and combine during my photo-surgery.  Some real images of the moon from NASA and other sections of the moon were generated with AI and merged/blended.   Dust clouds, creature glow, energy maw, and particles are added in Affinity Photo.  Eyeballs created using Filter Forge were added to the creature.  Stone circles were pulled from images and masked in, with casting runes embossed on them.

Hi-rez image link [5041px wide]

Animated Nrub'atocto

 I took last night's AI-combo-human-edit image and fed it into Pika.art to see what it could do.  Not bad, I like the flame work.

Nrub'atocto - She Who Feeds

"Nrub'atocto - She Who Feeds" --- In the lightless caverns deep below the earth slumbers the ancient daemon Nrub'atocto. Interred in a nameless crypt, she has lain dormant for 917 years, her presence seeping into the rock, soil, and underground streams. When the slow work of subterranean rivers and trembling earth finally cracks open her tomb, Nrub'atocto awakens, ravenous from her long fast. With screeching howls and shattering chirps that echo through the buried passages, she wiggles and claws her way to the surface world that she has not seen for nearly a millennium. Any remote villages or towns built over her restless resting place soon hear baleful chanting from below as Nrub'atocto singly emerges. She brings a wave of maddening, dream-like visions of an alien realm that shake the sanity of all those who fall beneath the pulsing rays produced by her radiant eyes. Nrub'atocto appears as a grotesque hybrid of octopus and female humanoid, her pale pink flesh drooping with decay yet animated with an unnatural hunger. She breaks the surface, pushed forward by numerous powerful tentacles, exposing her two sharp-clawed hands, and screeches from a near bottomless fangless maw, releasing the foulest of odors with each fetid breath. Though she can devour victims physically, Nrub'atocto prefers to drain their life essences psychically, leaving behind desiccated corpses and wildly muttering lunatics doomed to perish shortly after. When Nrub'atocto has fed to her fill and the last haggard humans flee or fall to her mental assaults, she retracts through the deepest tunnels and crevices. Finding another hidden niche in the buried earth to make her lair, Nrub'atocto surrounds herself in a cocoon excreted from her writhing, slug-like lower body, once more sinking into dormancy where she silently feeds on the residual terror left behind.

Affinity Photo Workflow: A dozen image prompts using Bing DALL-E, and Nightcafe ImageAI to generate bits & pieces I wanted to chop up and then combine into new photos.  Combined separate monster heads onto octopus-like body parts, the church was taken from an old painting scan I found, most of the graveyard pieces scanned from a comic book, used a couple Filter Forge tricks to sync look-and-feel, a bunch of manual edits, a lot of clones, brushwork on the radiant eye beams, and tons of masking.

Hi-rez image link [2546px wide]

Hypnotized by a Hippopotamus

This one was a quick single Bing Image Creator (DALL-E 3) prompt which I then enhanced, cleaned up some AI artifacts, and brightened the glow on the eyes.

Hi-rez image link [2345px wide]

Celestial Menagerie Expedition Earth

UFO collecting another pack animal for their celestial menagerie...

[Affinity Workflow: collect images from the USDA public website of farms, found some mules on a public free image, UFO from stock images, added more lights. used brushes to make the tractor beam, particle brushes, a motion blur effect on a mule. hand brushwork on cloud fixes.] --- took me longer to collect all my image materials than to combine them together.

Hi-rez image link [2045px wide]

Lovecraft Murals at the Lincoln Nebraska Post Office

Finally, after 8 days of dealing with multiple contractors, my murals are finished in Lincoln Nebraska at the local post office, right next to the Pinnacle Bank Arena at the intersection of Canopy & R Street.  I can't wait for my series of Lovecraft-themed postage stamps to start shipping next month.

Hi-rez image link [3072px wide] and direct link to my postage stamps.

Beauty and Brains

Here's something a little different today, created as vector art within Affinity Designer, which I'm calling Beauty and Brains.

Hi-rez image link [4096px wide]

Firestarter Habaneros

Where spicy gets fiery!  'Firestarter Habaneros' are from Umbrella Corporation's third-generation biofood labs creating the third hottest Scoville flavor score in the known world.  Meta AI Imagine prompts, composite open-source images, and hand edits within Affinity Photo.

Hi-rez image link [2328px tall]

UFO Sandblasting the Arizona Desert

Image captured of a UFO probing the Arizona desert floor with modulating plasma beams during some late-night experimentation.   There are some surveillance cube-shaped drones flying a perimeter loop around the spacecraft during the operation.   Composited from a few Meta AI Imagine prompts (for inspiration), grabbed a bunch of skyline+desert+UFO image searches, and then combined it all with additional Fx work inside Affinity Photo.

Hi-rez image link [2600px wide]

Batman (papercraft) Standing on My Kitchen Table

Batman papercraft creation that I have standing on my kitchen table, the figure is about 6 inches tall. Created during a Meta AI Imagine session along with using Affinity Photo to merge all the elements together, fix the missing cape the AI forgot, and render a final picture.

Hi-rez image link  [4115x wide]