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Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Tomas Jr.’s Innsmouth

02 Saturday Dec 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

Due in November and seemingly shipping now, an illustrated “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by Spanish artist Tomas Jr.…

Tomas Jr. is a renowned illustrator and a great admirer of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. He has illustrated J.R.R. Tolkien and has collaborated with Guillermo del Toro and the Jim Henson Company.

Tomas Hijo is, in my estimation, one of the great modern engravers” — Guillermo del Toro.

Published by Ediciones Minotauro. I can’t immediately find a Minotauro website, and there’s nothing on the UK or Spanish Amazon sites. I guess a Spanish bookseller might get it for you.

The release prompts Spanish pop purveyors Dawn to note that Dawn also…

published this summer the youth adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, written by Adri Ortiz and illustrated by Maria Garcia.

At Tomas Jr.’s website, I see there’s also a print of Lovecraft available.

And, nicely timed for a post on Spain, S.T. Joshi’s blog offers a lengthy new “A trip to Spain: the photo essay”.

More new LORAs

30 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

More new additions to Stable Diffusion 1.5 LORAs, used for text-to-image AI image generation. Pulp / sci-fi ones such as these, of possible interest to Tentaclii readers, are swamped by the zillions of LORAs being produced daily for each-and-every Japanese anime character. But they do appear quite frequently, for those willing to hunt for and find them among all the new fluff.

Art Deco Architecture – v1.0. Of obvious use for 1930s and 40 sci-fi backdrops. Seemingly trained on wide-scale deco concept art produced by architectural illustrators of the period.

Sumerian Architecture – v1.0.

One can combine LORAs for generating the same image, so the combinatorial possibilities should be obvious for science-fantasy illustration. Possibly these two may combine in interesting ways with the also-new Multiversal Vistas – v1.0, said to be trained on “strange futuristic vistas, forgotten technology and monumental artifacts”.

Also of possible interest, though this time to the retro crowd, is the 1950s style but highly polished Romance Comics – v1.0. (Warning: can also do nudity). Seemingly trained on slick cleaned reprints, rather than scans of the original yellowing comics. SD 1.5 knows what Lovecraft looked like, so I guess one might be able to have this produce a comic featuring Lovecraft. With the era-correct suit, shirt, shoes. But I’ve yet to try that.

(Limbo) Liminal Space Style – v1.0. In the influential ‘spooky silhouette’ style of the ground-breaking Limbo videogame.

And Dictionnaire Infernal (updated today).

“18th century Antarctica with heavy Lovecraftian elements”

29 Wednesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

Two wranglers of the fiendish 3D software Blender require a visuals impresario…

We’re making a cRPG set in late-18th century Antarctica with heavy Lovecraftian elements [and] we’re looking for someone to help out in terms of aesthetics & visuals

Probably must be familiar with the look that’s possible in videogames with only a three-man team. No modding of a retail game is talked of, so I assume they’re building from scratch with the aid of the rich ecosystem of add-ons and Blender’s new off-the-shelf modules.

What my AI suggests…

Lovely LORAs

25 Saturday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

New free SD 1.5 LORAs of possible interest to pulpsters, RPG-ers, self publishers, and others. These have appeared this week on CivitAI, and are for use with free desktop AI image generation software such as InvokeAI.

Cross-section Underground

Style of Roy G. Krenkel (Golden Age comics artist and illustrator)

Style of Jean-Pierre Gibrat – v2.0 (lesser-known French BD artist)

TangoOne – Gil Elvgren (retro U.S. pin-up style). Specifically for use as an add-on to the M4RV3LS & DUNGEONS model.

Eric Powell Style (comic artist, looks suitable for depicting Lovecraft’s Innsmouth).

At Inferno 2024: ‘H.P. Doomcraft’

23 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Set for the Inferno metal festival in Norway, in March 2024, the live event “H.P. Doomcraft”. Being a…

collaboration between storyteller/visual artist Kim Diaz Holm and musician Costin Chioreanu, translating four works by the father of cosmic horror, into an unique and transcendental audio-visual experience. “Nyarlathotep”, “What the Moon Brings”, “Memory”, and “Ex-Oblivione” were all directly inspired by Lovecraft’s powerful dreams, and haunting narration and art combined with Chioreanu’s otherworldly music will bring it to nightmarish new life.

Looks like both men know Lovecraft well, and are experts at what they do. I’d hope for something on YouTube later in 2024. Though I guess the live event is the real experience, with the full speaker-stacks and a mass of nodding Nordic noggins. Booking now.

New book: H.P. Lovecraft (Pop Icons)

21 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

Due at Christmas in the French “Pop Icons” books series: H.P. Lovecraft. It’s co-written with Alexandre Nikolavitch, the author of the graphic novel H.P. Lovecraft – He Who Wrote in the Darkness (2018), which inspires confidence. Translating the blurb, one finds it’s also half a comic-book biography…

Alongside Nikolavitch, twenty of the most notable comic-book creators illustrate the most significant episodes in Lovecraft’s life and some of his most famous works.

Sounds good, at a chunky 258 pages with accomplished French BD comics artists and writers at the helm. The book ships in French on 1st December 2023.

On the cards

20 Monday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Hurrah! A very kind benefactor, who was upgrading to a blisteringly fast 40x series graphics-card, gifted me his old GeForce RTX 3060 12Gb graphics-card. This worth-$250 hunk o’ joy has been slotted in to my PC and suitably wrangled. Thus I’m now a proper local/desktop AI image generator. Since I also managed to install InvokeAI 3 on Windows 7 (it runs Stable Diffusion models), with a little .DLL swop-out trick, and everything AI is working fine and fast with the new card.

Nicely timed, released today… the free Alienscape – Strange Landscapes LoRA for SD 1.5. Generates the sort of landscapes you might have seen on an old SF paperback cover, from your descriptive text prompt.

The other thing I’m enjoying is the Stable Diffusion community ethos, once you break free from the paywalled online service-providers. Everything is free, once you have the card to run it locally. UI’s, models, add-ons, tutorials, workflows. All free. Nice.

Monstrously big in Japan

16 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

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

≈ Leave a comment

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

≈ Leave a comment

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.

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