The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

The Princess' Butterflies - By TET and Prome AI

Over 23 years ago I drew a very rough pen sketch to illustrate a scene from a story my partner and I were taking turns at writing, at the very beginnings of, what started out as a very long distance relationship.

Original Hand drawn pen sketch of The Princess' Butterflies.

My original hand drawn pen sketch
drawn over 23 years ago.

The original image has been sitting in a frame placed on display in the various houses we've lived in over the years. As I've gotten more into animation I've thought about progressing it to a finished artwork and then animating it.

It's one of those things I've just never gotten around to even though I have experimented with how I'd go about it from time to time.

Today I came across a text to image AI art generator, Prome AI that has this incredible feature called Sketch Rendering which you can try out yourself completely for free. They also have a number of other AI art tools like inpainting and out painting and more which you can explore.

The sketch rendering feature allows you to take any sketch and have the AI render it as a full color image in varying styles from photographic through to anime.

What's truly amazing is the four render modes that determine how closely the AI follows your outlines. Specifically the 'Outline' render mode seems to be the most precise, sticking to the outlines of my princess image almost perfectly. Which is quite impressive for how rough the sketch is.

I used the Outline mode with the 'Common Natural' style to generate my images.

It took twelve generations to arrive at two completely rendered images that I liked. One exactly rendered the princess how I'd always imagined her in a blue flowing dress. The other rendered the waterfall in the background almost exactly how I imagined it.

The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how
closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has
misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump.

I did try many more generations to see if I could get a perfect, single generation (and to try out some of the other render styles just to see what they would produce) but I really only kept getting endless variations that were close but not quite.

Alternate renders of my sketch with less strict settings.

A couple of alternate renders of my sketch using different render modes
that are less strict on following the outlines of the sketch but still
retain the general idea of the prompt request and sketch.

I ended up downloading the two images I liked and manually merging them in Krita (my graphics software of choice) to get the final image that I feel is almost exactly what I had envisioned so many years ago.

Though having said that, the art style is so not my style that there was little chance I would have ever come up with this particular final render if I had tried painting it myself. It's too close to realistic illustration. My style is more cartoony and painterly.

However Prome AI is an impressive resource that is one way to fast track your own sketches to fully rendered art in seconds. I could definitely see myself using it in the future to bring more of my sketches to life as finished art.

Comments

New Cat Art Collaboration: TET's Cats Paintings and OpenArt AI Model Workspace (Photobooth)

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...

Making the Ukulele Cool Again By Inventing One That Transforms Into a Guitar Mid-Performance

Mattias playing the Ukulele that turns into a guitar in ukulele mode. Y ouTuber, Mattias Krantz , set out to solve one of the biggest problems with ukuleles, and that is, they are ukuleles. As he points out in his video they're one of the only instruments that people respect you less for the better you get at playing them. As someone who bought a ukulele because I wanted to learn an instrument, and I couldn't really afford a guitar (plus I found a ukulele that I think is pretty cool, but only in comparison to other ukuleles) you can imagine my interest would be really piqued by a ukulele that transforms into a guitar. Anyway, there is not much that needs to be said other than, a ukulele that transforms into a guitar isn't a thing you can just buy off the shelf, which is why Mattias set out to invent one. Nothing I say will be more interesting than just sitting back and watching his video below. It's a fascinating journey that I wanted to share and, maybe one day, eith...

Review: ArtHelper - The All-In-One AI Writing + Marketing Assistant for Artists - 'ChatGPT for Artists'

ArtHelper prides itself on being all 'human-made' art. T he idea of an AI, trained specifically on art business marketing, that can not only offer advice on marketing your work, but also assist with creating all the content too, is certainly appealing. Especially to those of us who would rather spend more time creating our art than trying to sell it. ArtHelper does just that whilst attempting to be your 'home' on the internet. A destination for your profile and portfolio, a marketplace for your art, and a directory of artists as well, with one distinction - all the art must be human made. Which, for you AI artists, doesn't count the prompt for AI generated art - because the idea, according to ArtHelper's creators, isn't the art. Which is a fair point, in terms of promoting art 'made by a human', but can get kind of murky when you understand that not all AI art is generated from a single prompt... and 'found object art' isn't actually ...

Who Even Reads This?

W riting this blog is largely both a labor of love and a discipline. Since about 2006 (the blog started in 2004) I have written a minimum of two posts per month. Sometimes I've posted more, particularly in the last 4-5 years, where I've tried to write and post at least one article a week without fail. Unfortunately it's not a niche blog, unless the niche is things that interest me. Which means my blog is either too broad to have regular readers or too niche to have anyone other than my mum reading it. Which she does (hi Mum) as we established back in January of 2014 in the post Ya Mum Reads it... That said, this blog overall regularly gets 6-7k views every month, mostly through people finding various articles through search engines. By far the largest traffic source is 'Other' which is basically unknown sources. I'm willing to bet a large percentage of that is the dead internet. Bots testing my comments to see if they're spamable or Illuminati spammers. Whil...

Embarrassing Yourself with Doof Doof Music

Ever since Spinal Tap popularized the notion of turning an amp up to eleven audio systems have been rising to the challenge of louder, more awesome sound. In particular, car audio systems have embraced the notion of the bigger the noise the better the sound must surely be. What I'd like to know is, if these sound systems are so good, why do they make all music sound the same... Doof, Doof, Doof? You've all heard them. Pimped up cars, with audio systems seemingly worth more than gold, volume blasting way past eleven. Sound waves booming long before you make a positive visual on the car... Doof, Doof, Doof. It has to be the audio system right? Surely all these people can't be playing the same tune? Doof, Doof, Doof. Could it be that the more money spent on a car sound system the less musical range it will actually play? Maybe these people can't afford to buy music after purchasing the audio system so they all play the same demo track? Doof, doof, doof. In my own car I hav...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Movie Review: Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) Spoiler Free

F rom the moment it was announced, I knew I was probably not going to see Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu in cinemas. The Mandalorian Disney+ Series finished it's story with no real pointers towards where a future story might go, beyond 'the further adventures of...' There was nothing to really hook me in. I did enjoy the series but it never got me invested in the title character or his cute prodigy so much that I wanted to see more. Unlike the original Mandalorian, Boba Fett, who I was eager to see more of, until he got his own spin off series. Then I just wondered who wanted this particular story, that clarified everything about such a cool and mysterious character until there was no mystery left? Then we got the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu which confirmed it was just a new adventure as a standalone film, with the purpose of introducing the characters to people who hadn't watched the series. I don't regret not seeing this in cinemas. It's a ...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog