# Deep Coral Treasure

tl;dr
Midjourney and Disco Diffusion as fancy photoshop filters.

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The following is an exploration of utilizing some of the latest machine learning clip diffusion techniques, collaborating with text to image algorythms and combining them into a collage in order to arrive at a final composition.

## Starting with Disco Diffusion (DD)
My first prompt for this was inspired by basket stars, which in themselves are quite interesting creatures to look at.

Beginning with DD 5.6 and some tweaks for portraits that I've found useful for other purposes, I used the following prompt:
> "A ceramic sculpture of a basket star and sea fans intertwined with coral by Ernst Haeckel and Gustav Klimt and Rebecca Guay and Alex Grey, trending on artstation:18",
"earthtone colors. underwater, sea foam and bubbles:14",
"ceramic, glass, and metal materials:12",
"DOF:-5",
"depth of field:-3",
"blur:-4",
"hair, beard:-1"

The artists in the prompt have themes of swirls, colors, and tiny details whose styles I thought would lend themselves well to this tiny creature. The following are samples from those artists mentioned in the prompt:

This helped me arrive with some of these basic forms:

Using Krita, I combined these forms into a collage:

Then processed them again with roughly the same prompt and settings through DD:

I combined these into another collage and framed it with a custom background and base:

Processing this through DD again with the same prompt yields some interesting results, but weren't yet to my liking.

I changed up my skip steps for these initial images and added in some new images generated quickly from Midjourney:

> A full-body portrait of a mermaid with a humanoid body and fish tail with scales by Ernst Haeckel and Gustav Klimt and Rebecca Guay and Dan Mumford, trending on artstation. earthtone colors. underwater, sea foam and bubbles.

> underwater cityscape with bright lights in the distance, by Ernst Haeckel and Gustav Klimt and Rebecca Guay and Dan Mumford.

The collage:

Results were interesting here, but felt too busy to me:

So I generated another background image quickly from Midjourney:
>underwater looking up

And pulled the mermaid-like images in closer to frame the subject coral wall:

This end result is something I'm pretty happy with abandoning at this point ;)