Concept art and info for my new comic “The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer”
I’ve been working hard on my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer. I have now written the dialog for almost 200 pages and will soon be ready to hire an artist to draw the comic. However, I will need the rest of October to understand better how many pages exactly the comic will have in the end. At the moment, I project around 500 pages, so a little over half of Gaia.
If you’re interested, you can find more info about the setting of Scarlet on the linked page. Of course everything there is still subject to change.
I used the fantastic new image generation tool Dall-E 3 to generate a lot of concept art for Scarlet. Some things I can’t show yet of course, but none of the following pieces of artwork can be considered spoilers so I want to show you some of the cool artwork I generated:
The main character Scarlet Carolus
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Logos featuring Scarlet Carolus
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The second main character Tibor Frey
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The Machine of Eternal Summer
An illustration of the machine will be shown in the second page of the comic, so it’s not a spoiler to show it here.
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A mysterious yellow megastructure
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The Master Crystal
The Master Crystal is located in the center of the Twin Cities (Capella and Callisto), the political and cultural center of Lavarel.
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Some landscape impressions
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How can you, an artist, justify using AI which has stolen the work of thousands of artists, probably including yourself?
@ David D.:
It would be super sweet if image generators could create characters from my comics. I’ve tried several over time, but none of them knows them. Too bad.
This is exciting! I will look forward to your new comic.
This is cool, I’m looking forward to it!
When you look for a new artist, are you looking for one who will do both S&W and this comic or just one of them?
Looks amazing!
Really fun to see an artist I’ve admired for a long time make use of the AI tools instead of rallying against them. I hope that, eventually, image generation will become a common tool used by artists of all kinds, like graphics tablets and Ctrl+Z are used today. AI art is too inconsistent and clunky to be used for long-form media but for now, at least, it makes perfect sense to use it to generate non-“hero” details: backgrounds, props, hair, special effects. It’s a promising time-saver.
PS: No, DALL-E doesn’t “steal” art. That’s not how AI works. The models contain no images whatsoever. Zero. Every image generated is original. The AI learns to draw the same way humans do: by looking, and learning.
Thanks for the positive remarks!
James wrote:
I will certainly not require an artist to do both. But if I find a good one and the style is a good match for both, why not?
FireEsper wrote:
I’m not sure why it’s now already two people here who call me an artist. Sure, I sometimes made minor adjustments to Powree’s comic pages, but that doesn’t really qualify me as an artist. I’m an author.
FireEsper wrote:
Yeah, it works particularly great for concept art and fanart. It’s nearly impossible to get anything concrete out of it, or it would require ridiculously long scene descriptions that it may or may not understand. Not even looking at the consistency of character design, it’s currently way too hard and time-consuming to generate a single non-trivial comic panel that has all the main characteristics that are important to you as a writer.
FireEsper wrote:
Actually, Humans have additional step: valuing. Humans can get better by looking at two images and recognizing one as better. AI can’t do that (yet). When you give the same set of images to human and AI, human can learn to be as good as the best of those images. The AI will get as good as the average one.
Novil wrote:
Authors are artists! They make art!
But, yeah, it’s not the usual definition of the word. We appreciate you both is all. 😉
HKMaly wrote:
Yes and no. AI does plenty of validation, and a lot of the improvement we’ve seen during the AI Art boom comes from research into better segmentation, recognition, and validation tools. But it’s a statistical process, not a conscious one like what happens in your brain. It’s still a program, a tool.
Concept art looks very promising so far, excited for the new series.
The concept art looks very interesting. When you first announced that you were doing this comic I was extremely exited. I always loved Gaia and the fantasy genre in general. Since releasing the concept art, I am even more exited for this comic to come out. Do you have a general idea of when you will start releasing strips? I realise this will rely on, in part, on you finding an artist, but I hope it is sometime soon. I enjoy both of your current comics and believe this one will be very good as well.
@ David D.:
If someone isn’t really skilled enough to draw and convey ideas to a satisfactory standard – using A.I. for some references isn’t too bad in my opinion. Novil is still trying to find an artist after all.
Emma wrote:
I have applications from several excellent artists and they seem to be able to work on the comic without much of a delay. So it won’t take very long, maybe even only a couple of weeks.
Man! That’s gotta be the best A.I art I’ve ever seen! If you had not mentioned the fact that it was A.I made, I’d have no idea.