City Forests
An art response to a creative challenge
Those of you who have followed my blog these last three years know I take part in (am one of the organizers of) a weekly creative challenge. For the folks who are new here, this is how More Odds Than Ends works, and you can play along too! Every week I get a randomly-assigned prompt challenge from one of the other participants, or if I haven’t sent in a prompt, I can choose one of the Spare Prompts. This is usually, but not always, a response in words with fiction. There are no real rules, no wordcounts, it’s simply a mechanism to catalyze the mind into active imagination.
It has been great fun.
Sometimes, when the whimsy strikes me, or when I haven’t time to get fiction out of my brain and into the electrons, I choose to respond in art. This is one of those weeks.
City Forests were a great idea in theory, but the engineering to put them into practice proved painful.
—AC Young
To Midjourney I went, to render concept art. The first one, with no modifiers, wasn’t bad:
Interesting that it’s more than a little apocalyptic. So what do I get if I run it with the —niji modifer?
Fabulous warm lighting, as I have come to expect from this style, but wow, that’s even more abandoned looking as a city goes. I kind of want to go exploring there.
Adding more complexity to the prompt to evoke a different feel netted me some interesting, and more lived-in looking, results.
That last one looks very much like a Utopian vision from a science fiction world. I like it - an amalgamation of botanical garden and living spaces.
The retro fantasy style went very dark places. These hold stories for my mind. The post-apocalypse expanse where technology has devolved to swords of scrap left by a dead civilization.
Or perhaps even more eerie, an alien city of fey beauty…
If you want to read all of the prompt responses, and perhaps take part in the prompt challenge yourself, head on over to More Odds Than Ends, where we odd creative types try to learn how to finish our projects instead of bouncing off to the new and shiny, leaving a trail undone behind us…
