Automated art, landscapes and beaches

 kw: experiments, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, art, generated art, images, prompts

I tried a few prompts to produce landscape paintings, even though both photos and scanned artwork, in large (HD and 4K sizes), abound in Google Images and Yahoo Images. I have downloaded many such images into folders that are used by a "screen saver" slideshow program when my computer is idle. Anyway, I thought it worth trying. I first tried Asian art, then more "ordinary" forest scenes, using the following prompts:

1. A woodcut of a pagoda near a lake in mountainous country colored with pastels
2. Ink and watercolor, highly detailed, Chinese scroll landscape with pine woods, steep hills, and a river
3. a calming forest scene with wildflowers in a meadow, a stream, and a small pond, landscape painting
4. A painting of a meadow in a hardwood forest with a stream and scattered wildflowers, mountains in the distant background

The prompts are clockwise from top left. The pagoda image is rather clumsy. There are two ways that block prints IRL are colorized. Some are printed from a single block with shading and then hand-colored later, and others are printed from multiple blocks with colored inks. This image looks like the latter case. That is to say, multi-block prints were used by Dall-E2 as the "universe" of images to respond to my prompt.

The scroll painting has interesting frame shifts in three places. Near center, what appears as a small waterfall at the base of a dark cliff morphs into a root wrapped on a broken-off tree trunk with growth on its top. At lower right, the scale seems to change, with tiny trees appearing to be far away when viewed in isolation. At upper left, a bit of detached landscape floats in the air. Dall-E2 does such "hallucinations" at times.

The two forested landscapes are both pleasing to me, and I often use one or the other as a background with using Zoom with a green screen. I've found that Dall-E2 "assumes" conifers are meant when "forest" is prompted, unless one specifies "hardwood", or perhaps "deciduous". These hardwoods appear to be birches. If I wanted oaks and maples I'd have had to say so.

I also like beaches, so I tried a couple, with these prompts:

1. A sandy beach next to a rocky beach below cliffs, digital art
2. A long stretch of sandy beach backed by sea cliffs, winding towards a distant horizon, digital art

The upper image reminds me of a portion of Pismo Beach, a place I stayed a couple of times several decades ago. The lower one came out like an aerial photo or drone shot. The shape of the bluffs is reminiscent more of a semi-tropical area such as New Zealand (sadly, known to me only through photos). I could have erased the sand bars at lower right and had Dall-E2 put in more water, but they do add a little interest. My favorite body-surfing beaches, near Huntington Beach south of Los Angeles and Sunset Beach to the north, have sand bars at low tide, which at high tide generate large, fast breakers that are a thrill to ride, but not popular with surfboarders.