Continuing on with my deep sea creature art kick, I tackled some cephalopods - the dumbo-eared vampire squid & a juvenile long arm octopus.

Catch up with this art project and the AI style transfer / painting process I am using with the first & second posts in this series if'n you want to.

---

Vampire Squid

When viewed from this angle the vampire squid is kinda cute. Of course you can't tell that the inside of the tentacles are covered with gnarly teeth. I should probably paint another version where the tentacles are pulled back and the crazy teeth are showing, it is truly freaky.

Process

Reference photo on left is not my image, including low res version here as fair use in illustrating my process

I have been using a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio for this series so I stretched out the pose of the vampire squid a bit, the original was even cuter in its stubby headed way IMO. I began with a simple gradient in the background that roughly matched the color of the water in the reference photo and did a quick paint of the squid.

Here is the original quick paint, completed:

Next an AI style transfer run (deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle v.2) using my quick paint above as the base image and the reference photo I was painting from as the style image. Here is the raw output from this first AI run:

Then I painted on top of that first AI output to create a 2nd generation of painting:

Finally I ran the 2nd generation painting back through AI style transfer, 2nd generation painting as the base image, original reference photo as the style image. This yielded the final result I shared at the top of the post :) One of things I was really happy with about this piece was the way the bubbles and bits of stuff in the water came out in the style transfer - I actually used this reference photo in AI style transfer runs to bring in bubbles in the water in other images in this series as well, e.g. the bubbles in the light of the lure of the black dragonfish & red dragonfish I shared last time.

Long Arm Octopus

I may come back to this one and do some more painting on it, but for now I have called it good so I am gonna go ahead and share it. The body of this juvenile long arm octopus is transparent in places which is a hard effect to capture.

Process

Reference photo on left is not my image, including low res version here as fair use in illustrating my process

Above you can see the reference photo I used (left) and my original quick paint from the reference image (right).

Next an AI style transfer run (deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle v.2) using my quick paint above as the base image and the reference photo I was painting from as the style image. Here is the raw output from this first AI run:

Then I painted on top of that first AI output to create a 2nd generation of painting:

Finally I ran the 2nd generation painting back through AI style transfer, 2nd generation painting as the base image, original reference photo as the style image. This yielded the final result I shared at the top of this section.

---

Until we meet again - stay weird Hive!