Author and artist Ursula Vernon is not one to stay idle, and a few days ago she shared a hopeful albeit bittersweet comic about nature coming back after some unmentioned apocalyptic event. The story is a lovely one, and while Vernon can certainly draw, she decided for this project to use Midjourney, an AI program that creates images from textual descriptions.
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Vernon posted the mini-comic on Twitter (the beginning of which we will also embed at the end of this post), and also shared her process using Midjourney. Read on if you care to learn more about that, and if that doesn’t interest you, feel free to scroll to the bottom of the post to read her mini-comic, “A Different Aftermath.”
According to her thread, Vernon said she started her Midjourney journey in July. “I will walk through fire not to have to draw buildings,” she wrote. “Once I saw what [Midjourney] was capable of, the question was ‘Could the computer handle that for me?’”
In July, the answer was basically no. Vernon revisited the program in late August when it apparently got an upgrade, however, and had better luck. The results still needed some touching up but that process took her much less time and effort than before. She also knew that her story played to the AI’s strengths—silhouettes of people rather than full images, and that there weren’t multiple shots of the same place.
You can see the results below and now appreciate it on its own, as well as with the knowledge of how Vernon created it.
I made another weird little comic thing, hopeful and a little bittersweet, about conservation after the apocalypse. A topic near and dear to my heart, Lord knows. (Technical notes in another thread, linked at the end.) pic.twitter.com/weAcMbbu4Q
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) September 10, 2022
