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Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Monstrously big in Japan

16 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New in the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, an academic article offering “An Exploration of the Appeal of the Cosmic Horror Series of Gamebooks for Call of Cthulhu TRPG | RPG”. This considers, partly via online surveys, some of the reasons for the sustained popularity of the Call of Cthulhu RPGs in Japan.

The Call of Cthulhu series is said to be bigger than D&D in Japan, and synonymous with ‘tabletop RPG’. The success is apparently aided by the relatively simple rules, adaptability to different time-frames and sub-genres, and a strong player base among female fans (meaning male fans can ‘play with my waifu’).

More AI freebies

15 Wednesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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More looking through CivitAI, which is the main repository for free generative AI image models and plugins. There’s a lot there, and it can take a lot of digging to find stuff.

There’s some obvious Cthulhu / Giger / pulp etc stuff. But here are some other interesting non-obvious items, which seem to have Lovecraftian and RPG potential, and which you would never find via search.

These two might be combined in interesting ways… SAMO bones carving (intricate ivory carving) and Occult Geometry.

You would be able to use negative prompting to steer the Bone Carving away from an Anime / Chinese look, and more toward Giger / Lovecraft.

And for RPGs and illustrations involving museums, explorers etc…

KnollingCase (puts X inside an old fashioned specimen case for museums).

Antixdisplay (puts X inside a modern museum display case).

And for Victorian / Edwardian explorers, Muttonchops / Sideburns (Realistic) (for men) and DrawingSD1.5 (19th century pen and wash pictures) for the explorer’s old books of field-notes.

How far AI image generation has come, in just a year. What will another year bring?

Comic Book Historians

11 Saturday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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A new ‘fannish-but scholarly’ site of possible interest to Tentaclii readers, Comic Book Historians.

Moebius emulation via Stable Diffusion 1.5: a survey

09 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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More delving into the options for ‘add-ons’ that can steer the Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator toward certain styles or objects in its images. The community’s work on SD 1.5 add-ons now has an excellent range and depth (things move fast in AI-land), and also a healthy dash of ‘quirky’. The ethos is ‘free’, and there’s no payment involved so long as you run the image generation on your own PC. Image generation can be helped along by ‘guide poses’ created from 3D-figure desktop software such as DAZ Studio and Poser.

For the style of the French comics artist Moebius with SD 1.5 I found the following, after a thorough search:

* Moebius Color Style – v1.0 is a LORA that tries to emulate the later ‘colour Moebius’ style. Said to work best as an add-on for the large Xenogasm checkpoint model for SD 1.5, which seems to have been specially trained for the sort of subject matter you might find in old 1980s copies of comics magazines such as Heavy Metal, 1984, Epic, etc and similar. Perhaps also Zona 84, Ere Comprimee etc, at a guess. The 1970s-style Xenogasm model is NSWF in the eyes of the 2020s, as you might expect. Apparently Xenogasm 2.1 is the last before it started being heavily re-worked for more realism, so you may want to try that first.

* WASMoebius V1, which is an Textual Inversion ‘Embedding’ add-on for SD 1.5 rather than a LORA add-on.

* For a more old-school ‘B&W Moebius’ one might try the Centerflex – v2.8 checkpoint model. Its main promo images are photoreal and it is a “photorealistic-first” model. But delve into the description and note that this is a dual model. Switch it to its illustration mode and it is said to specialise in the ‘clear ligne’ line-art of the French and Belgian BD comics and Moebius in particular.

Artist styles that this model was explicitly trained to on include Roy Krenkel, Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Milo Manara, Willy Vendersteen, Francois Schuiten, Edgar P Jacobs, Herge, Jacques Tardi, and Moebius. […] This model contains a general activation keyword phrase to evoke a certain hybrid comic book style and composition. This phrase is “ligne claire” meaning “clear line” after the Franco-Belgian comic book [line-art] tradition.

* Possibly also worth a look, in complete SD checkpoint models, is the Protogen Infinity checkpoint model. Trained on comics, isometric art, science-fiction. As well as Protogen, ReV Animated (aka ReVAnimated) is a model name that pops up for use with the more comics-oriented LORAs. There are also SD 1.5 models trained on modern western superhero art, such as iCoMix.

* Metal Hurlant Comics – Moebius, Bilal, Druillet is a LORA trained on a range of the classic 1970s/80s French comics artists. Though it appears to work best with the more grungy Druillet style. An ‘alpha release’, and not likely to be updated to a 1.0 release.

Another Damn Art Model (ADAM) was partly trained on Moebius, along with other Heavy Metal and 1970s artists.

* There’s also a relatively refined attempt at Enki Billal – v3.0, a Bilal style which might combine well with one or two of the above. Update: And another attempt, Enki Bilal Style – v1.0.

Some people combine checkpoint models and LORAs and ’embeddings’. So for instance one might combine the big Centerflex model with the smaller Moebius Color Style LORA as an add-on.

I don’t see anything that can do the distinctive ‘dash shading’ of Moebius. Although I’m not sure an AI could do this, unless it could be trained to follow the shading on a depth-map from a 3D figure / scene…

Ok, that’s what I found. Now all I need is the 12Gb graphics card for the PC, to be able to try them out. 🙂

Necronomicon Pages AI generator

07 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 5 Comments

Necronomicon Pages – v1.0. This is only a LORA, something perhaps best thought of as a small plug-in for a large generative AI base model. The pages were made using this LORA with the EIDOMODE Stable Diffusion 1.5 Checkpoint model.

Here the indecipherable-ness of AI text is turned to advantage.

Also spotted, a new LORA for Hannes Bok – Golden Age Pulp Style – v1.0, for use with the SD 1.5 base model. May work well with Metropolis 1927 style.

And since this is also Kittee Tuesday, yes… there’s also a LORA for High Quality Cats – v1.0 and the more meme-friendly CuteCat – v1.0. Even a cosmic Space Cat generator. Though the LORA for the 200+ feline cat expressions they can make has yet to arrive. Still, these are perhaps useful for making “H.P. Lovecat” images.

Patrick Muller

06 Monday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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The monthly update from the German Lovecraftians notes their latest podcast…

An interview with the filmmaker Patrick Muller on 15th October 2023: “With his silent visual reflections on literature, Patrick Muller has created his very own cinematic cosmos,” says Clemens Williges of the Braunschweig Film Festival. There in three short films, Patrick devotes himself to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. On the podcast he talks about his passion for analog film-stock as, pop cultural socialisation in communist East Germany, the cinema as a place for transgressive moods, the role of music, and writing for cineastes – and of course about H.P Lovecraft.

The dLG-Radio interview is on YouTube, so the Googlebot automatically translates the German to English subtitles.

Patrick’s site is www.patrickcinema.de complete with lobby posters and links to his films…

Drone idols

01 Wednesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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John Coulthart takes a long dive into “The Great Drone Ones”. Being his survey of… “the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014”. The “wholly instrumental” “dark ambient” music…

is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks.

Twilight Zone

30 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The AI Art Weekly newsletter ‘$50 challenge’, themed as “Twilight Zone”. Submission via Twitter only.

Illustrators #42

29 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The latest Illustrators #42 magazine (October 2023) leads with a Richard Corben feature.

The Halloween comics are also flying freely through the mists here in the UK, from the new This Comic Is Haunted British horror comic, to a set of Halloween themed Commando releases.

Moore Lovecraft

28 Saturday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org, an academic book on Alan Moore: Out from the Underground (2018), one of the Palgrave series which discussed comics and graphic novels.

Has little to say about Lovecraft, but does show that the Lovecraft influence was strongly present as early as 1969…

Having met the young Dave Womack at the second British comics convention in 1969, he [Moore] sent him some illustrations and an article on Lovecraft, the latter of which featured in the first issue of his dual comics fanzine/adzine Utopia/Valhalla in February 1970.

And adds one more item to the list of early Lovecraft as character appearances…

Moore’s “Breakdown” in Embryo 4 [circa 1971?] had similar Orwellian themes (‘Cold terminal eyes in the control chamber fingerbutton proseflash’) and ends with a conversation between Orwell, Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.

Embryo #4 is a zine that doesn’t appear to be on Archive.org.

Kitbashed Cthulhu

26 Thursday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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A clever stylised Kitbashed Cthulhu, via Propnomicon…

This is a bag of sea creatures from Target [a big U.S. discount store], a dollar-store bag of Halloween skeleton warriors, and a Vampire bat from the “Todd McFarlane’s monsters” playset from the 90’s

AIs know Lovecraft

24 Tuesday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

I love that nearly all indie generative AI models know what Lovecraft looked like (‘indie’ because those of Adobe etc are quite obviously censored). And, increasingly, can also generate cats. Cats being a tricky creature, due to their natural camouflage and near-infinite contorting combinations of outline-shape.

Here’s an example from a new AI which makes retro pixel-style images…

HPL returns from the mailbox with his daily haul of letters, ‘zines, books and kittens.

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