Pink Moon Paintings

Here is my experimental process for creating a surrealist painting of a pink moon dipping beyond the horizon of an ocean.

Midjourney

At first, I wanted a photorealistic pink orb in the sky. But my style was set to max, which means Midjourney will go off script from my prompt. I was happily surprised by the result in the top left! On the right, that thumbnail is upscaled.

I also tried this same prompt with [[ Dall-E Mini ]] and [[ Dall-E 2 ]], but they looked way different!

I recommend installing the Midjourney bot on your own Discord server so you can see your messages without anyone else’s generations pushing your messages away 🙂

Dall-E 2 Variations

Generation 1

Uploading the image above to Dall-E 2 to generate variations.

Generation 2

I think it’s really rare that the style is still retained most of the time even in Generation 2. It seems to be depicting a post-apocalyptic world with sinister black shadows. Perhaps a pink moon/sun object rising from the ocean?

Generation 3

Now it’s losing the original vibe, but I think the idea of smaller orbs/planets is inspirational, so I’ll keep it in mind.

Outpainting Prep

In Photoshop, I decided to use the Content Aware Fill to see what it would generate if I extend the background of the images.

Left: Original Dall-E Image. Right: Content Aware Fill with Photoshop. I think the bottom portion of the image is potentially usable for a final piece, but it definitely messed up the horizon. I’ll use Outpainting in Dall-E.

The eerie vibe reminds me of Ram Han’s work, a little bit. That’s why I’m selecting the generations that are both glowy and spooky, since I’m drawn to that style.