Schmooz

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?

Two major factors influence my creations.

The first being my mood, emotions at the time, and the subject/theme. I find that most of the time if one of those is out of sync it can affect my passion to create.

But, second, my curiosity. It can spark my passion to create back to life. Seeing what might happen if I use a certain starting image with a polar opposite prompt keeps me motivated.

For example, I recently used a prior Daily Challenge (DC) snail creation as a starting image to create a pair of dragons for another DC submission.

I have spent far too many credits just seeing what SDXL will create.

NC: MOST UNDERRATED ARTIST ON NIGHTCAFE?

How would you quantify that? All of the artists that I’m familiar with are from Discord, and I feel like I’m chasing them, as they’re all amazing and have tons of likes/comments on their creations.

NC: PROMPT THAT MOST SURPRISED YOU?

“Owl sitting on a treehouse floating in space inside of an orb that is sitting in a teacup which is inside of a glass jar in the middle of an endless field of flowers at sunset” + the default negative prompt

I created this one partially as a joke, and partially out of curiosity for what SDXL might make of it.

This is because it was a combination of the frequently seen DC creation topics and themes being discussed on Discord at the time, with no direction for the creation’s style.

I was blown away by how amazing 80%+ of the creations generated looked, even though each creation only contained a handful of the topics. I can only guess it’s because of the AI’s familiarity with each of them.

NC: ANY TIPS FOR PROMPT WRITING?

Learn as much as you can about what different style modifiers do and experiment with them.

NightCafe shows I’ve made 13,000+ creations and a lot of those were just me experimenting (and deleting lol). I was, and am still, learning.

Also, the hashtag #openpromptgang is a great resource for learning how writing, style modifiers, and even punctuation can affect your creation.

But, overall, I recommend experimenting. Some things that don’t seem like they should work can lead to some pretty awesome creations.

NC: WHAT LED YOU TO USING NIGHTCAFE?

I had seen an article on AI art creation and figured it might be a good source for D&D character art.

I searched Google, and NightCafe was the first thing that popped up.

After some trial and error, I managed to create some decent portraits. Then I noticed the Daily Challenges and figured I might give it a try as I had fun making the portraits.

After a couple of weeks of experimenting and figuring things out, I managed to get my first “Top 20%”, and after that, I was hooked.