Doubt I’m the first to think of this but I discovered an interesting process to create artwork with ai that I though I’d jot down. The key idea is instead of simply trying to generate the image you want, you go though a process of generate -> edit -> generate -> edit. Lets follow along with how I came to the image above to get a better idea what I’m talking about.

The first thing I tried was generate what I wanted directly from a prompt.

1girl, solo, cute, fox ears, fox tail, red hair, long hair, blue bikini, beach, key animation, dynamic shot, soft lighting

The results are promising, but none of them are quite right. In theory I could edit one of them to fix it’s issues, but they are complicated enough that that would be very difficult for me to do. So lets step back, what if I created something I could edit instead?

1girl, solo, cute, fox ears, fox tail, red hair, long hair, blue bikini, beach, simple sketch, clean lines

A simple sketch of a fox girl with long red hair in a blue bikini standing at the beach surrounded by extra tail artifacts

Ok, still not quite right but the style is simple enough that I could work with it. The first thing I did was break up the foreground from the background.

Lets start with the background first, I removed the extra tails and filled in those ares with simple colors.

A simple sketch of a beach filled in with simple colors

I then fed this back though to get something a bit nicer

beach, simple sketch, clean lines

A simple sketch of a beach with minor artifacts

Cleaned it up a bit

A simple sketch of a beach

Ok, clouds would be nice, lets generate that

A simple sketch of a beach with clouds and minor artifacts

and paste them in

A simple sketch of a beach with clouds

Ok now for the foreground. I did want some blue eyes so I generated those as well.

1girl, solo, cute, fox ears, fox tail, red hair, long hair, blue bikini, gorgeous blue eyes, beach, simple sketch, clean lines

A rough sketch of a fox girl with long red hair and blue eyes in a blue bikini standing at the beach

As for the rest of the cleanup, it was quite a bit of work but not too bad. The hand was the the hardest. Neither me nor stable diffusion seem to be good at drawing hands 😂.

A simple sketch of a fox girl with long red hair and blue eyes in a blue bikini standing at the beach

Finally I ran this though again to up the quality

1girl, solo, cute, fox ears, fox tail, red hair, long hair, blue bikini, gorgeous blue eyes, beach, high detail, soft light

A fox girl with long red hair and blue eyes wearing a blue bikini standing at the beach with a messed up hand

Sigh, it messed up the hand again, time to fix.

A fox girl with long red hair and blue eyes wearing a blue bikini standing at the beach

And there we go! All and all I’m pretty impressed with this process. I was able to work around stable diffusion’s limitations and get exactly what I want with my limited art skills.