Platypus of Truth

  AI upgrades of original doodles made to look like trendy Fantasy book covers. 

  Here are the final Jirel of Joiry drawings from my ouvre. I'm moving on to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress Volume I. Drawings are moving on to that Dark Lady series I can never get traction on writing. We'll see if Bradley and company can help jump start my creativity. 

  I used one of my own drawings as a template for an AI bonanza. Starryai has gotten much more sophisticated over the past 6 months. We'll see what happens if I up the use of my template from a mere 50 percent to something higher, however. Then it was actually be an artistic tool.

 A little Mignola influence on these. Jirel is here based on French actress Marine Vetch. Guillaume is Dev Patel. The wizard is cribbed from Frazzeta. 

 

 

  I'm reading a history of Sword and Sorcery, and it's only increased my respect for C.L. Moore and her stunning creation: Jirel of Joiry. 

  Femme Fatales, femme formidable  What are the differences between the rippling muscles and bulging buttocks of the nude men of Sword and Sorcery and their female counterparts? Warhammer has attempted to solve the problem in their Age of Sigmar and Warcry lines. It seems as if their goal is to render their War Queens along the exact same lines: equally clothed, muscular, and posed. Their Chaos warriors are equally bulky and armored and their screaming sibarites are androgynous. Dark Elf witches now even dare to be ugly occasionally.  Artists have been drawn to both the sexual and asexual beauty of the human form since time out of mind. Since the advent of ethical monotheism, society has often sought to censor or control this tendency. As a result, expressions of nudity in art have often found their outlet in ancient myth and the fantastic. Michelangelo turned to Scripture, Titian to Grecco-Roman Myth. The Pre-Raphaelites added Medieval legend. Gauguin and Picasso looked ...

 Disney, Conan, Tolkien today. You'd be surprised to see how hard it is to find one of the most iconic images from Conan the Barbarian. I had to pair a grainy still with two separate references. The old Disney backgrounds are masterpieces of Fantasy art. 

  Darned if I don't love the way Frazzeta draws men. His women would be great too if he kept their power and dropped the sexual exploitation. 

 

Reworked with white out and pen:  

 Coloring pen works from last month:

 

 

 

 

 

 Reading through C.L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" and tried to tackle the titular character as well as touching up the Sword and Sorcery sorceress 

Well, I've done it: I've finally finished Robert E. Howard's entire Conan oeuvre. The journey has been several years long, and I've also taken side trips to cover Howard creations Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn, but I have finally reached the finish. What do I say now that I have reached the end? When I began this journey, one of my friends quipped that Conan should be known as "the venerially diseased" instead of "the barbarian". Others told me that they had simply given up along the way -the racism and misogyny were too much. I did give up on Howard's younger contemporary, Fritz Leiber, for about that reason. Having read to the end, I can confidently say that these criticisms are true: Conan is not a good man, and Robert E. Howard was a cynical nihilist out to earn a buck -but that's not the whole story. Conan and his creator also reflect the realities of the Great Depression and a life on America's not-so-tamed former frontier...