Illustrated Drabbles - Face in the Mirror

 Face in the Mirror

I stare at my face in the mirror and I can’t be sure that it’s really me. My eyes are hunted and bruised from nights of disturbed sleep. A dread has stalked my dreams, twisting them into nightmares that linger even in dawn’s embrace.

In the mirror I glimpse a malformed shadow lurking behind me, its touch is cold upon my skin and fills me with terror. My will fails and I fall into the mirror, my final scream frozen in glass.

I gaze at my reflection and admire my new face, I think I’ll wear it for a while.

My old drabbles are providing a useful target for my experiments with Midjouney - an AI tool for generating images based upon image and text prompts. There's an art in its own right to creating the prompts - one that I haven't mastered yet, although I have managed some interesting pictures.

For this one I tried a simple experiment - what would the results be if I fed it just the drabble? I wasn't allowed to modify the prompt, all I could do is create variations based on what it generated. To be clear, it's not the optimal approach, mostly because of how it parses the text. It doesn't read the story, and draw all of the elements together. The most obvious example is the classic twist in the tail in the last line. If planning the illustration I would have wanted to capture the moment before the final transformation, but somehow convey its inevitability.

To be fair though I didn't provide direction (if needed) to it as I would a human artist, or if I was using the prompts to guide towards my design. That wasn't the purpose of the experiment, and I have to say that I was impressed by the variety and how well it captured some of the key concepts. It seemed obvious to me that it should be able to do so in a relatively literal fashion, and to an extent it did do so. However it did focus on different aspects and so created some variety, or even concepts that I wouldn't have necessarily thought of myself.

In the end the variation settled into a few suitable concepts and over many iterations I chose the above image. It wasn't the most faithful interpretation, but the facial expression, and slight disjointed appearance to the face, as if it didn't fit correctly sold it to me.

There were other close runners, which I've included below. Which one would you have picked?