Day 22: The Wall

Welcome back to Thingadailies!

In case you've forgotten, I'm doing a low-budget, no-talent recreation of this AI-generated book cover. For science!

When we left off, I had a gate, an arch of thorns, some spooky background fog, and a rose that I haven't imported into the main project yet.

Step 1: Make the gate more substantial

I decided the bars on the gate needed to be thicker, so I selected everything, increased the selection by 5 pixels, then dumped black everywhere. I did reverse that in a couple places because it looked too chonky, but I think this works better overall. (I'm still debating whether to take out a few bars — it will probably depend on how it looks when I add the castle behind the gate.)

Step 2: Add walls around the gate

Sure, the original has something that may be stone walls or at least pillars of some kind. And I probably could have found something in DepositPhotos that would have done the job, but I decided to see what I could find in my neighborhood. Hey, I'm out walking the dog anyhow.

I found a few stone fences that I probably could have made work, but then I found this:

One of the things the bizarre AI-generated image offers is a weird sense that things that aren't living (like metal gates) may be alive. So I decided to add more life into my version by using ivy as my walls.

First we get rid of the sky, then we bring the ivy wall into the main picture. It starts out like this:

And yes, that looks horrible, but we're going to desaturate everything and make it so dark you can't see anything anyhow...

So there we are. Tomorrow I'll add a castle, and maybe some trees.

Tip of the day:

Adopt a dog so you have a good excuse for taking pictures of random objects in your neighborhood.