Behind The Scenes: Winter Café (Patreon)

The festive season is in full throttle now and I had several ideas I wanted to make until the end of the year. Most of them I have already written down somewhere and they kind of bounce off my previous works. I have spoken about the advantage of producing high volume of work before, so I'll just briefly mention, that it allows you to curate your existing work and build up on those ideas, reskin them and repurpose them into something new.

In this case, I can always browse through a variety of my projects and see if they can be reworked into a holiday theme. Or, I can be reminded by my wife, that one of the café dioramas would look cool with X-mas decorations. Guess which case is this one? :)

Soo, the winter / x-mas café. Sounds good. I dug up the old design and started thinking about how to approach it. What direction should I take? Use the same layout and change the style and decorations? Or try to come up with some new composition?

Visit the full Pinboard here

I'm pretty sure you have heard of Midjourney by now. It's all the fuss in 2022 and the talk about AI capable of creating complete works of art is everywhere. There are multiple tools available and I mostly use Midjourney, for it's easy interface in Discord.

In this case, I gave the AI my old coffee shop design and gave it a simple instruction (text based prompt) to come up with a similar design with a festive mood. The way it works is, that the AI spits out some low-res results and you can choose which direction to go for the next iteration, or if you wish to upscale one of the results right away.

You can see the final result up here in the middle ( I went through several iterations). It's astonishing, how it's able to reproduce the overall style, mood, lighting and presentation, while giving a fresh perspective on the content. Of course, the moment you start to explore it up close, it's a bit of a visual gibberish, but as a visual guide, it's amazing. And it's based on my own style and previous work, so I don't need to feel bad for generating a concept. At the end of the day, it's the same process I do every time when searching for references and inspiration. Only, this tool does it more thoroughly and in matter of seconds.

Talking about a fresh perspectives, I really liked how it attempted to place the door somewhere, even thought it didn't make much sense here. But it made all the sense to me and I immediately wanted to use it. A lot of times, when making these stylized open room dioramas, I deal with only two walls of the room and leave the rest open. Occasionally, I overflow some of the elements for the sake of getting better mood, or telling a better story.

But this was something new to me and I immediately sketched a room layout with a third wall, that's basically just cut out and mostly left open, providing only a hint of how it looks by placing the door and a bit of a wall under.  I could see it will still allow me to have the most of the interior visible, while telling a better story and delivering more architectural style when including the door.

If you go through my reference board, you will see I didn't stop at the AI concept. It was a great pivot point to get me going, but I still needed to research some things up close. Like the different furniture styles, alternative layouts and windows, materials, decorations. All of these wrapped gifts stuck to the wall, that's a completely different source that just fell into place like a piece of puzzle.

In the end, I think I delivered a work, that's coherent and consistent with my style, but I was able to push it a notch further using new tool and I think there's a great value in a help like that.

We don't need to fear AI, we just need to stay creative and productive :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube