[Art & Warcraft Stuff] September 2023 Doodles

[jordangreywolf]

This month marked more progress on the house. I was determined that I'd get back into hosting games again, and having friends over. I also worked on some art, too.


Chocolate and Roses
A "virtual birthday cake" I drew for my mom. "Best of all, ZERO calories!" (I used this for a "card" with text in the negative space on each side.)



Pirate Day Spiced Apple Punch
I'm not sure what's particularly pirate-y about this at all, but for Pirate's Day (the World of Warcraft tip-of-the-hat to "International Talk Like a Pirate Day") I was asked to draw some spiced apple punch for a recipe. So ... yarrrrr! Add a little pirate flag and that makes it official!

I also drew a birthday card design for my dad. I've covered that in an earlier post, though I shared it at the time for other, less happy reasons.



Pandaren Waitstaff
Pandaren (anthropomorphic panda-person) restaurant server with a plate of seared scallops in pomegranate sauce, and a garden salad.

It was around this time that Gwendel started really getting into Stable Diffusion AI art. I'd played around with Midjourney before, at the encouragement of one of my bosses, but there was only so much I could do, and it felt more like a toy than anything. However, Gwendel was fine-tuning things and had a setup that would work locally on her computer, not requiring an internet connection, and not having to wait who-knows-how-long for a queue to start working on it. I started playing around with silly stuff like trying to make Sasta portraits to share with Koogrr through AI, but most of them required a LOT of "surgery" to make them not-awful. One thing I found useful, though, was that I could feed it an idea and give me some inspiration on poses and composition and color palette, and maybe a general look of a character. I used such generation to give me some ideas for this Pandaren picture as references, though I ended up drawing elements from several different pictures (and inventing a lot of stuff I simply couldn't rely on the AI to get right).


Cheese-Stuffed Pretzel
For Oktoberfest (or Brewfest): a cheese-stuffed pretzel.

Around this time of year, Gwendel and I made an effort to visit some (semi-)local German restaurants to celebrate Oktoberfest in some way. My mom and dad really enjoyed visiting the "Oktoberfest" area at EPCOT, but that would have been a little too $$$ for us to attempt just for the sake of that. We managed to get our share of schnitzel and pretzels and red cabbage and (ugh) polka music before the season was over, though.