Over the past few years, I’ve created a collection of creatures during my commute. The creatures tend to have a rounded shape with silly hands. Over the years, I improved at shading and lights, but I’m still not amazing at drawing poses and detailed body parts, and that’s where AI started to get into my workflow. I’ve been trying to bring some of my old experiments drawing creatures in Polaroids to life using Midjourney. Using my drawings as a reference and playing with weights, I could achieve some really fun results. Trying to keep the prompts as simple as possible, I kept most of the essence of the initial images, just bringing some realism to the drawings.
That’s where the short experiment First Dates started, converting some of my creatures using MidJourney and animating them with RunwayML. Feels like I was also indirectly inspired by the beautiful comic book I’ve recently read, Flake by Mattew Dooley and hours of listening to the album Her by Arcade Fire & Owen Pallett.