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∞

In the beginning there was no beginning.

∞

It is a convoluted story. Turn to the page about space dragons.

Once and again, and again to be, there was nothing.

But once and again, and again to be, there was something.

∞

A dragon is a bridge between something and nothing.

A consciousness arising from the void, crystallized in living flame.

A body formed and transformed of this world

∞

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A while back I found a demon spider in my shower. In the comments to that post, everyone's favorite scribbling scrawler @scrawly demanded requested that I create a space dragon. Hey, I like giant monster and space stuff as much as the next alien, so I was happy to oblige.

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Process

I was backing up some old photos and came across some crappy cell phone photography of a cool blown glass art exhibit I saw in the Portland Art Museum years ago. I recognized the space dragon potential and made a collage from sections of my original photography:

Original base image - photoshop collage of my original photography

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I have created a ton of variants on this image, running it through the Deep Dream Generator using different style images. One of the things I like to do at the beginning of these projects is to create a solid black and white layer to use as a texture base over which I will layer different color mutations. I will pick a good candidate from the initial runs through the Deep Dream Generator and go over any rough areas by hand in Photoshop (well, by mouse), using the paint and smudge tools as well as liberal applications of the clone stamp tool.

Here is the original deep dream that I used as the base of my black and white texture layer:

I love the melty textures but there are some large sections of undifferentiated black. In the "head" I like the black and decided to leave it, but I wanted to fill in by hand and clone stamp the sections of black on the wings. Here is the reworked B&W layer after I finished up to my satisfaction:

I combined the above B&W lines layer with a different B&W dream that has great structure, using the "multiply" blending mode. Here is the second B&W dream I used:

And here is the new B&W base image I made by combining the two layers above - this new base image is what I used to run through the Deep Dream Generator while making my color mutations:

Then I made a ton of color mutations :) There are currently 31 different layers in the Photoshop document, each representing a different pass through the deep dream generator (at a rate limit of 2 per hour at the highest res the generator allows), each using a different style image. I combine the different layers in different combinations and transparencies, and use layer masks to hide or emphasize certain sections as needed (and occasionally paint / smudge / clone stamp as needed). When I am working on a project like this I generate hundreds of combinations on screen and usually save dozens of the more promising ones as variants to pick through later. Oh the starfield images used in some of these are CC0 from pixabay.

To illustrate the difference between one of my layered compositions and the raw color mutation layer that comes out of the deep dream generator, compare the dragon above with the raw output below. The below unedited deep dream is the dominant layer in the dragon above:

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Mor Dragonz

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I uploaded most of the images in this post to Imgur so you can click 'em to embiggen

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Bonus Weirdness

Hey look at you, you made it to the bottom of the post! Here have some bonus weirdness. The vertical format strange abstract piece at the top of the post that accompanies the poemtext about dragons is one of several fruits from a discarded tree I was climbing early in this project. My initial thought RE "space dragon" was to make a collage out of leaves to use as my dragon base image. I was not entirely happy with my result and abandoned that direction before spending any serious time with it in deep dream, but I did goof off mirroring some of the early results to trippy effect.

Leaf Dragon Collage

B&W deep dream of base image:

Trippy Leaf Dragon Mirrors