May 13
Oh Father of the Four Winds fill my sails… A young Robert Plant blows some gentle breezes in this evocative illustration by Morgan Rogers. Unfortunately her site is retired and not being updated, but the Zep artwork is still there. A scanned page from the artist’s sketchbook. There’s a quality to her work that is …
Apr 24
A thangka is a Tibetan religious panting depicting a Buddhist deity or concept. It’s usually done on fabric in bright pigments. To my surprise, I generated a dozen of these using the following prompt: Lion, human head of Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo, who is credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet in the late Eighties. The …
Apr 21
[Previous posting on Elric art here.] Another way portraits of Elric can classified is by the musical genre they evoke or were influenced by. Elric was born in 1961 and matured over the decades since, which means his teenage years, the most musically-influenced period of a young person’s life, ran through the 1970s and …
Mar 16
It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each …
Mar 15
Cults can be amusing, or terrifying. The quintet of fellows above date from the early 1970s, members of a West Coast cult called The Source that even had its own rock group, of which they might be the members (or perhaps Doug Henning wannabees?) Note their similarity in costume to pictures of Aleister Crowley done …
Mar 06
I was trying to generate a picture of a Sea God here, but I think the figure created makes a very nice Loki (the God of Chaos and Mischief in Norse mythology.)
Mar 01
A selection of plant-related Twittersnips from the years 2017 – 2020. Plants Plants Butterstink Blessed Weaselwand Thimble of Thorns Toadbeard Herbal Infusions Weeping skullcap Extraction of crushed foxpot Essence of sweethimble and pussy-pine Frogboot stamen solution that reduces a fever Brew of hairy queenspike bark and greatblossom seeds Nurestink Pollen Oil Pink Fiddlerus Velvet …
Feb 22
I went to generate a pic of Elric on a Melnibonéan dragon by using the prompt “Albino warrior, black armor, rainbow dragon” and look what I got! But it’s so cool looking I’m going to keep it. A more conventional Elric was generated later and you can see him to the side. I did an …
Feb 20
Mexican philosopher Manuel DeLanda called cities the “mineralization of humanity.” Invertebrates like snails, clams, and nautiluses generate outer coverings of calcium to act as their homes. Now humans have begun to do the same, “mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton.” What might happen if those shells developed personalities of their own and began …
