A Slaga Portrait Saga
Finding Slaga
How hard could it be to get a picture of our protagonist, Feldregor “Slaga” Boyden? You put a few prompts into Midjourney or ChatGPT and watch a beautiful, brooding pic of the young man appear. If it’s not exactly right, a few clicks in the variation matrix should land you a cover-ready image, right? Wrong! Especially if you’ve spent years creating this character and his world and they’ve become a part of the family, along with Bruno the corgi. (RIP, Bruno. We miss you.)
It turns out, Slaga’s uniform was the problem, especially his hat. It is a black kepi, or forage cap, like the ones worn by soldiers in the Civil War. The prompt meant nothing to AI, at least for a while, and coupled with a non-conforming jacket and pants, it got even worse. If I prompted the bot to show a picture of a Civil War private, it would spit one out, but it couldn’t get the variations right: they all had ammo belts and baggy pants.
Having been a digital artist for many years, I turned to my iPad, determined to draw Slaga myself. I bought tutorials from established digital artists and practiced, practiced, practiced. I even bought a replica kepi on Amazon and took photos of my kid wearing it. Slaga has a straight razor which I wanted him to hold, but AI kept giving him swords, so I bought a razor, also from Amazon, for reference. After all of that, I still wasn’t happy: Slaga was elusive.
The Process
The answer, as it often is for me, was a hybrid solution. I got a decent background from Midjourney with the four moons of Stheara and autumnal night-time vibes, but hated the hat, face and sword. I took my pics of the hat and razor and imported them into Procreate on the iPad. I kept after Midjourney to get a face of a 20 year-old with Slaga’s coloring, but it was ChatGPT that finally gave me a good image. Most of them looked middle-aged. With face, hat and razor in hand (digitally speaking) I flew them into Procreate and started tweaking. And tweaking. Finally, I got the face in place, the hat on the head and the razor in hand. I drew the 21st Insignia and added a few more little details like Bracey patch, (The Braceys are the Sthearan royal family) which wasn’t actually in the book, but was fun to make.
The Finished Product
Here is a close-up of the 21st mim (military indentured man) patch.
