Most of my recent deep sea creature studies have been relatively faithful to life. Not so with these :)
I shared a dragonfish in my first post in this series. It was just the head and a small curve of the body, seen from the side. I painted on top of that and turned it into this made-up deep sea creature:
I do not know what is up with those weird seal flippers LOL
For reference here is the original dragonfish image I mutated into the above:
I made some variants:
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Hold on I think the dragonfish ate my peyote buttons
And now the Goblin Shark Grotesquery
I worked from a goblin shark reference photo but drew a four eyed vertical mouthed tentacle tongued monstrosity. I was still using the same basic technique of trying to capture the variation in texture and color from the reference photo, and then running my quick painting through AI DeepStyle (deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle V.2 ) using the reference photo as the style image.
This image is three generations in to the process of quick painting / AI DeepStyle run, painting on top, another AI run, etc. I don't have process shots for this part unfortunately, I had a hard drive crash and lost a fair amount of art (everything I hadn't posted online I lost basically, 3 months of art). Don't worry, I have 2 automatic backups running now LOL.
Then I made it weirder with layers of AI style transfer from octopus & brittle star flesh.
This bad boy went through many iterations before arriving at the above state. Some other monstrosities:
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Say hello to my little friend. You can call it "Fluffy".
Bonus NFT Action
As a special treat, I cooked up NFTs from three of the images in this post at NFTshowroom.com. Click on the images to find my art listed for the low low price of 25 Hive each for these 1/1s, straight from the midnight zone.