My Partially AI-Generated Cover -- A Recap

Here's how I made the cover for Star Language.

First I subscribed to an AI art website called Night Cafe. It had many different art modes and one of them was anime. After spending a few pleasurable minutes generating pictures of characters from my books, I asked it to show me the protagonist of my latest, Melina. 

Melina is eighteen, petite, brunette. Half Greek, one-quarter Texas-via-Mexico Hispanic, one-quarter unspecified haole. I'd tell you trauma is her middle name, but it's actually Aphrodite. She describes herself as more cute than beautiful. 

After I clicked the random generate button somewhere between twenty and fifty times, suddenly I found myself looking right at Melina. Anime version. I'd recognize her anywhere. I spent several months inside her head, and it was uncomfortable to say the least.

What did I want to do with Melina, you ask? I wanted to make a digital model of her to pose for a book cover. I had some creative fuel already burning with regard to this. The book, Star Language, is a tragedy about a girl who translates for aliens and becomes the catalyst for a lot of violence. My elevator pitch is [Stranger In A Strange Land from Gillian's POV + Malinche and Cortes + Carrie] x Tarantino x linguistics.

I bought one of the first paperback editions of Carrie. It looked like this, just a creepy girl's head floating in space. 

From the Malinche and Cortes part of the story I started looking at Aztec art, and became fascinated with the Aztec calendar. In the center is the sun god Tonatiuh, with his tongue out.

Another deity known for her protruding tongue is Kali, a Hindu goddess with a distinctly destructive streak.

So I wanted Melina to pose in space, with her tongue out. Looking a little bit deranged and trippy as she locks eyes with you from her book cover, with some disjointed letters swirling chaotically beneath her. I didn't want her anime style though. First I ordered the AI to give her bigger, Western-style eyes.

Notice she's already got a few stars behind her. After I turned her into a Western-looking anime girl I uploaded her into a different AI, one that does non-anime art. Suddenly she was a sketch, with the same sad brown eyes.

I fiddled with different art styles, coming up with some rejected ideas like this waif.

Until finally, Melina herself was staring at me. Like she wanted to kick my ass. 

Getting her to open her mouth and stick out her tongue was difficult, but I kept at it. It required grafting in some other girl's teeth. Melina had a long, Gene Simmons tongue at first, and I used Paint 3D to remove it, as well as to crop and isolate her head. Then I noticed her eyes and nose were far too distorted, so I took her back a few generations. And shortened her tongue. 

I went through lots of star fields and this blue one was one of the rejects. Finally I took some NASA photos (public domain) and cropped out chunks of stars from three or four different shots, and came up with this.

All it needs now are some distorted, off-kilter letters.

By the way ... I also do hand embroidery. Here's my last piece, a guitar-playing maneki neko. I made it by tracing a standard issue maneki neko statue, tracing a guitar, and using Paint 3D to combine and scale them. Basically the same kind of process I used to create my book cover, except I added needle and colored threads to make it look authentically lumpy and organic.