CRYSTAL WIZARD

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?

It could be anything. A song, a comment someone made, a silly word.

Also a lot of natural curiosity: "I wonder what will happen if I do this..."

I'm a techie more than anything and I'm always digging into the depths of how something works; trying to break it so I can fix it and learn, and along the way finding all sorts of interesting stuff.

NC: WHO DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST UNDERRATED ARTIST ON NIGHTCAFE?

Everyone, really. We have a ton of very talented people, some who have obviously worked hard for quite a while and some who just discovered the tools a few days or weeks ago.

NC: WHAT'S THE PROMPT THAT HAS SURPRISED YOU MOST?

This one: "gold white gradient, fisherman by Fenghua Zhong, sculpture, porcelain; 3d shading".

I did tell it to make a sculpture but I didn't expect to get the results I actually got. I'll let you render it and see what you get 

NC: DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS FOR PROMPT WRITING?

Yes - the biggest, most important thing to do is to understand every single thing you're asking the AI to do and why those things work the way they do.

You don't know that until you spend some very boring time seeing what happens if you render just this word or just that phrase. What happens if you put these terms together like this, and then rearrange them like that.

Talking to the AI is much more like talking to Google than it is talking to a human. You have to speak its language and understand how it understands things before you can communicate with it successfully and get the results you are looking for. You're still going to get surprises — the AI is written to be random no matter how hard you try to make it not be.

If you don't care at all what sort of image you get, fine. But if you want something like, say, a pretty flower-covered landscape that has a rainbow in the sky with birds flying past, you really don't want to spend credits and wind up with some sort of apocalyptic landscape where you have no idea what happened.

When I'm creating the daily prompt I spend between 6 to 8 hours usually, working slowly through the prompt crafting to come up with something that is what I want it to be, making sure it renders well on NightCafe. That way I know that the people working through the lesson are going to be happy with the results they get for the credits they spend.

NC: WHAT LED YOU TO USING NIGHTCAFE?

Google. After Stable Diffusion exploded I just did a search on AI art generation websites and started visiting all the ones that came up.

I already had an invite to DALLE-E 2 before it went public, but I wasn't at all happy with what I was getting out of it. I spent a little time (and too much money) on several other sites. Wasn't overly happy and was considering buying a machine with a good NVIDIA card so I could run stable at home.

But when I found NightCafe I stopped looking. The images come out not perfect, but close. The cost is more or less free. The site is easy to use. And the backstory behind why the site was first created spoke to me. Not a corporation, just one guy with a vision.

It's a friendly, warm place with friendly people and a good spot to consider home.