How Utropiia is created

Utropiia is created through a combination of generative art (my tool of choice being Midjouney), and photo-collage, with editing in Photoshop. For more tutorials, please subscribe to Utropiia’s Patreon page.                                      

Collage:

I will typically start with a rough collage made from photos, either my own, or vintage black and white photos available for public use that can be found on sites such as:

www.pond5.com/

www.pdimagearchive.org/

Most often it’s a combination of both my photos and old photos, combined in a collage. This step can be skipped, but starting from an image really does makes the end result so much better and unique.

In this case, I decided to start with a photo I took in Vienna of a lizard sculpture on a façade. I love this sculpture, and in true Utopiian fashion, thought it would be cool as a colossal statue covering the side of a building, with passersby in front.

In Photoshop, I converted the image to black and white, and added in the foreground a silhouette I grabbed from another photo of mine, taken in Paris in winter.

To establish a sense of scale, I added smaller pedestrians just under the sculpture, taken from a vintage public domain photo. To complete the scene I added a streetlamp and a railing, which I had Midjourney generate using this prompt:

a vintage black and white photo of a vintage street lamp on a white background, with railing, captured on film --ar 5:3

To finalize the image, I overlaid a grainy texture scanned from an old book (more on that below) and added vignetting to give the image a vintage feel  

I mentioned a rough collage as since this is all just inspiration for the AI tool, it does not have to be a perfect, realistic scene. On the contrary, a disjointed image that would typically be considered “wrong”, either because the perspective is off or it’s unrealistic for some other reason will often yield more interesting images when reworked by the generative art tool.

Prompts:

Once this collage is finished, it can be uploaded into Midjourney, and the address of the image used as the beginning of the prompt.

Utropiia is a city set in an alternate 1910 world, so the goal here is to create images in the style of the early photography of Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Eadweard Muybridge. Grainy, dreamy black and white photographs. Prompts should be descriptive and state what the photo should show, starting with the most important element, but also include these photographic references, and include terms such as “grainy”, “dreamy” etc.

Most important is to mention “captured on film” and to include the type of film: daguerreotype, calotype, collodion process, or albumen print. That detail goes a long way to pointing the tool in the right direction.

This yielded a bunch of images, and I worked through them by asking Midjourney for variations on the ones I liked, by zooming out when I wanted to see more of the scene, and by modifying certain areas of the image as needed and editing the prompt as I went along with modifications.

In the end I chose one that I liked, but could not get the building with the lizard sculpture too stand out against the other building in the background. I was able to get a version of the image without the passerby in the foreground, which I could use to adjust the back wall in photoshop.

I upscaled the two photos I liked in and bought them into photoshop to combine them, adjusting the background on one and adding it to the other one. I also tweaked some details here and there (Midjourney has a tendency to add weird wires and antennae to buildings, these have to be erased) and added an airship in the sky (taken from an old photo) on a multiply layer, with Gaussian Blur, set at 40% opacity, with the contrast increased so as to blow out the sky around the airship.

Grain:

To finish the photo I add layers of grain. These are very old yellowed pages from books bought in thrift shops, scanned to get the texture. I overlay these over the photo as separate layers in Overlay and Multiply mode, with opacities ranging from 20% to 80% depending on the effect I want to achieve.

Sometimes I’ll keep the grain low to get a “cleaner” photo, but I also love the extremely grainy look of the photos of Edward Steichen, especially his portraits.  

Colour:

When combining several black and white photos from different sources that might have slightly different sepia or yellow tints, I bring down the saturation to zero to have pure b&w, then at the very end add back some color. The grainy textures go some way as they are slightly yellowish, and it’s also easy to add some to the underlying image with adjustments/color balance.

Conclusion:

Starting from collages is the best way I’ve found to get the AI tool to capture the feel and look I envision for Utropiia. I’ll often upload several photos or collages and as mentioned, an unrealistic image will often yield the most interesting results.

An example of this, this completely unrealistic city, pasted together from the photos below (a macro shot I took of a stick, and various engravings and old illustrations), when used as a starting point in Midjourney, created these atmospheric and unusual images of cities. These have a ton of potential and are unique. They’ll be making it into Utropiia.