After adding a few owls into my various watch-face grids last week, I decided several more were in order. First I asked for some metal-and-enamel owls …
… and then the owl below swooped in, from out of nowhere it seemed.
I also once again tried to make some southwestern guitar-playing cats.1 I’ve been trying to make guitar-playing cats almost since the very beginning of my adventures in generative AI and my recent results were both more consistent and credible than they’ve ever been before. Midjourney gave me only a few images with excess tails, legs, and/or paws this time around. It was a noticeable breakthrough.
The other requires a bit of personal history. I grew up playing classical guitar (I even have a music degree) and cannot tell you how many times I was told that “girls don’t play guitar.” Once I was older, numerous folks complimented me by telling me that I “played pretty good — for a girl.”
I strongly suspect generic guitar players are still often men in many folks’ imaginations — even occasionally my own, I’m sorry to say — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. So when Midjourney started popping out feminine guitar players, I was impressed. It’s true they were cats, not humans, but nonetheless it seemed like another significant breakthrough on Midjourney’s part.
Toward the end of my owl and cat experiments, the phrase “the owl and the pussycat” popped into my head. I’ve made so many cats by themselves, and so many owls by themselves, that I thought the next natural step would be to put them together.
Ha! The process took several days and many hours. Midjourney generated all sorts of images with two cats, or two owls, but getting one of each in the same picture was a near impossibility for a while. Nevertheless, I persisted.
It’s interesting that the post I linked to was published almost exactly a year ago.
Loved hearing a bit of your history. Your efforts to get the owl and the pussy cat together were worth it. Loved all the other illustrations here too.
These images are very pretty!