aiontheball

The Artist Spotlight is your inside look into the influences, collaborations and prompts that drive the NightCafe community.

We catch up with some of our most original creators to find what inspires them, who their favorite creators are, and how they use image generator algorithms as part of their work.

NC: WHAT INFLUENCES YOUR WORK?

My work is generated using sound waves as input images. Believe it or not, all my work is derived from sound waves.

What influences my work most is knowing that each piece I create can have extra significance for people because of the association with the song the clips are taken from.

That also makes me overly critical of my work as I don't want to create a piece that might ruin a song. I've noticed that people's perception of feelings in a song isn't represented in the wave. I've tried taking the emotion and mood of songs into account when writing prompts but sometimes the juxtaposition of the two is fascinating.

When I started, I experimented a lot with very few clips, from four or five songs. Over time, I've started experimenting more and more with manipulating the input images to get some crazy results. Now I have over 200 input images and many more songs waiting in the wings.

NC: MOST UNDERRATED ARTIST ON NIGHTCAFE?

Me!!! I know it might sound egotistical but I do think that the most underrated artist here is me. I haven't seen any AI artists anywhere doing what I'm doing. I've seen people generating images from song lyrics but never soundwaves - the audio itself.

I devote a lot of time to engaging on Instagram so I'm not that active on NightCafe. But right now I have about 70 likes altogether on NightCafe. I guess that once people begin to understand my way of working, many more will start to take notice of me.

NC: PROMPT THAT MOST SURPRISED YOU?

Image. Prompt: "a majestic mountain range with a stunning sunset in the background reflected in water, out of focus foreground, origami style, black outlines, high gloss reflections, metallic colours, matte background, ultra-detailed, thin black lined tesselation, golden hour light, sunlight glare in the frame, global illumination, dali style"

This piece is my unicorn. I love the result I got. I'm frustrated that it came from a more obscure song. I've tried recreating it dozens of times but I've never come close to getting the same result. That surprised me.

The prompt that has given me the most interesting results is this one:

Image 1. Image 2. Prompt: "A mountain skyline reflected in water, retro illustration, black outlines, splatter paint, graffiti style, neon colours"

This prompt is really good. The input images have a lot to say for the result but when I get the combination right, the results are really cool.

NC: ANY TIPS FOR PROMPT WRITING?

Try to keep the prompts simple to begin with and add more keywords to your prompts as you get more comfortable.

If you're using input images, experiment with the noise weight and prompt weight without changing the prompt too much. If you change too much at the same time, you'll lose track of which changes have the best effect.

Finally, remember to try to have fun with it. Don't be disheartened if you don't get the results you were expecting the first time. 

NC: WHAT LED YOU TO USING NIGHTCAFE?

I started using NightCafe because of the ease with which you can use input images in any format.

I became frustrated at being limited to 1:1 formats on my input images with other generators.

Once I found out that NightCafe could generate in the same format as the input file, I was hooked!