AI generated images

Just to recap my Websites

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Online there are several websites of mine, each one with a specific purpose and leading theme, thus it’s pretty easy to get lost among them.
As my uncontrolled interests range farther than that, I think it’s a good idea to contrive a simple summary page like this:

Web-ankh [DE-IT]: is the site of my web services agency.

There are quite a lot of web services agencies out there, but I think I can offer also something more: in particular
– a thorough protection suite against web malware, inclusive of firewall, updating and frequent backups for just in case.
– plenty of experience about online shops to sell digital goods – comes in handy more often than you think.
Gameover’s Atelier AI & I: this site ( also reachable as Luisa Fumi Digital Art) reflects my unrestrained curiosity about AI-generated art.

I tested so many dedicated AI systems and I think that for the time being Midjourney is the best: not easy to prompt, sometimes sort of “moody” (laugh if you wish), but really unique as results.
Here I present the outcomes of my fights with Midjourney (only the ones I won 🙂 upsized and post-processed in a traditional way.
I’m enthralled by this experiment and keep having a lot of fun with them.

All the images are “ethical”: they do not reference copyrighted characters, living artists, brands, or recognizable individuals.

To flesh out the site there are also a “Cover Art” section, a “mini-clips” page and a Print On Demand Gallery.
Professional photography: a site to show off my skills and my long extensive experience as photographer.

Mostly editorial and travel images from all around the world – untouched by AI hands 😊.
Hosted by Picfair, the site offers also a Print-on-demand service.

I’m thinking of expanding this site to more artistic stuff like exclusive cover art (a different taste from my corresponding AI covers). We’ll see.
Antikstock: last but definitely not least.
A rich collection of curated images (mostly engravings) from the past, all scanned from ancient books manically collected over a lifetime, all painstakingly restored from the damages of the centuries, all free from copyright issues (due to their venerable age).

I’m interested of images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments. Single images from the past, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

Working with historical imagery often means long research times, inconsistent quality, and stylistic mismatches.
Curated sets solve this by offering visual consistency, contextual coherence, and immediate usability:
press history, old magazine advertising, botanical art, medieval marine monsters, antique Egypt history and art… does it ring a bell?

And yes, I almost forgot it… there’s also my blog here.
I have a lot of fun writing it, hope you’ll enjoy reading it and commenting (unless you’re a troll – in which case you’ll be fed to our pirañas 😄).

My websites: from Archive to Curated Collections

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Over the years, my websites have gradually grown into very large image archives, bringing together historical reproductions, restored engravings, and AI-generated visual work.
Many visitors have explored them freely, sometimes using individual images as references, illustrations, or inspiration in ways I often discovered only by chance.

Recently, however, I began to feel that this structure no longer reflected the way I actually work.
Single images, isolated from their context, often lose part of their meaning.

What interests me increasingly is not accumulation, but coherence: images that speak to one another, forming complete visual worlds rather than disconnected fragments.

I was also aware that my customers often prefer to buy several images of similar content instead of a single one (botanical illustrations, more photos of a business center together, portraits of 18th century scientists, just to name a few).

For this reason, the sites are gradually being reorganized around curated thematic sets.
Here two of them on Antikstock



This transition also allows the visual material to be presented more clearly and consistently, while preserving the possibility of acquiring individual images when needed.

A smaller selection of standalone images and free resources will remain available, while new curated sets will continue to be added over time.
If you are interested in licensing or acquiring a specific image from a set, feel free to get in touch directly.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, shared, referenced, or quietly followed these archives over the years.

The Café-Library — Open at Night

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I’m quietly transforming my websites.
The idea is to offer full sets of selected images built around a focused idea — a set of visuals that share the same atmosphere and narrative thread, designed as a complete package ready for illustrators, designers, publishers, and anyone who needs consistent imagery with a strong personality and immediate usability.

One of my curated sets is The Café-Library open at night
I’ve ever been and still am fascinated by books – don’t know how many thousands I have at home – thus the idea seems fabolous to me:

a bookshop-café open all night with the option to sit quiet and read a book (rented or bought), and at the first morning light, with a warm latte and a book in your hand, to go back to your place and sleep the day.

The atmosphere draws loosely from literary and real references – from Gianrico Carofiglio’s Osteria, to many brillant works of Walter Moers, to the Library Bar in Copenhagen.
Then came my imagination: the quiet pedestrian streets of an Italian downtown, dim light all around, most of it coming from a cheerful open bookshop with tables and seats outside or inside, with people sitting there, reading comfortably and sipping a coffee.
Every so often at the same table sit two people, occasionally they talk together but usually they are as good as alone, each one completely absorbed in their reading.
Sometimes under a vaulted ceiling of one of these coffee-bookshops someone sits at the piano in a corner and plays a soft tune.
Not easy feeding the feeling to Midjourney, but I’m happy with the result of a consistent, common atmosphere.

Et voilà some of the 16 selected images from the set:

In a time of constant distraction, the idea of a place dedicated to open, welcoming, uninterrupted reading looks quietly radical to me 😀

Une petite note for the AI-skeptics:

If you feel like writing a piece of poetry you’ll probably use a word processor, if only because today stylus, nibs and ink aren’t all that easy to find. And no one will dream of claiming that the real poet is the word processor you typed on and not you.
Things change if you use a sophisticated AI as a writing tool, but not by much: there’s still something essential, let’s call it ‘the human touch’, that you must provide yourself lest the outcome sound somewhat dull, insipid – even though there’s always the simpleton who takes the bite and congratulates, but that’s another story 😉

Same goes if you use a sophisticated graphic AI to give body to a dream you found in your mind, that otherwise would take you days or months to draw or paint with your own hands: if you want it to evoke the feelings that inspired you, the human touch must come from you.
Hard – if ever possible – to tell what this mysterious human touch really is: it’s something that you feel, not that you understand. Something related to the rustle of old pages under your fingers, to the smell of an ancient leather binding, to a gentle breeze ruffling your hair, to the taste of an early coffee, to the faint memory of a happy moment lost in the past… and this is as far as I go.
A tool is a tool is a tool.

Gargoyle Party

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You know those nights when the imagination decides to go off-script? That’s how I ended up making a tiny gothic clip where one devil gargoyle and two strange creatures, sneak away from their eternal duties and throw themselves a party on some forgotten cathedral ledge.
All of it looks like straight out of a 19th-century engraving — sharp lines, dark shadows, and a mood somewhere between mischievous and slightly tipsy.
It’s only a few seconds long, but watching a strange stone creature relax with a drink in hand feels oddly… wholesome.


More whimsical clips to come!

Gameover POD Galley – Ice Dance Sketches

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new!

I made this set of (almost) black and white sketches using one of my personal styles developed on Midjourney.
I like them. It is not only about dancers but also about frozen movements in a moment of grace and black-and-white contrast: they speak of passion, raw energy, precision and elegance. And why not, freedom.

Pity I have not a single space left on my walls 😀

An own Print-On-Demand website?

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Voilà, here it is!


How did I come to face such a feat?
First of all, for fun: I love making websites, that’s it. I had just completed a serious, demanding, challenging website – a historical archive – and needed to do something relaxing to rinse my brain… OK, that’s the truth, but not the whole truth: there was also a bit of commercial interest behind my resolution.

All began when I started visiting the usual popular Print-On-Demand sites…

… disguised as a buyer, in order to find out why I was selling so little on them – well, I actually did sell something there, but not enough to deserve any serious time or toil. I focused on the most obvious form of POD: the art that one hangs on the wall.

I was appalled by the prices:

would I buy anything that expensive myself? Definitely not! Unless perhaps in case of love at first sight, but that seldom happens.
Greed may certainly play a role in setting those high prices, but there must be something more to it. Let’s give it a thought:

First question:
why should one buy a framed work of art somewhere halfway around the world and pay the outrageous shipping costs, when the bare printout would travel much cheaper and faster in a cardboard tube?

Then all it would take is a walk to the do-it-yourself shop around the corner to have it framed according to one’s taste, in a self-chosen frame, maybe also with a sheet of real glass (rather than those horrible acrylic substitutes that would survive the shipping). Which would save about 3/4 of the total cost.

But that’s not all.

Second question(s):

who prints the work of art you choose, and on what paper, and what kind of printer do they use?
Most of the times the colors you see on your monitor don’t look very much like those you see printed on paper.

Who checks the color rendition?

And the diffusion effect?

And the overall quality of the finished work?

Then a disturbing thought came in without knocking:

of course the POD website gets the lion’s share, but also the printers must have their slice of the pie, and the packagers, and the shipment company… what’s left for the author is but laughable pocket change 🙁

Which encouraged briefly the sneaky temptation to bypass at least the POD sites and go directly to those sites that offer printing&shipment as a service… but alas, nothing doing: unguaranteed printing quality, long or very long processing times (up to 2 weeks!)… better forget it.

All of the above looks pretty disheartening, but I’m stubborn: my glorious printer can handle up to A3+ paper sheets (13” x 19”), quite a respectable size for a picture on the wall. A high-quality printing on it takes a mere couple of minutes of my time. I’m free to choose the best possible paper with the right grammage, texture and consistency. I have an encouraging constant number of visitors who show up in my websites, thus there’s no need for advertising…
So why not?
If it works, fine. And if it doesn’t, at least I learnt something new and had my fun 🙂

As a matter of fact I already had a lot of fun thinking of what would fit best on a wall and devising the proper mockup images to convey the mood to my visitors – here too MidJourney, adequately flogged and directed, proved to be a great limitless resource.

The yuck side: bureaucracy

Death and taxes are notoriously inevitable, and in this case the taxes were the belle of the ball: I had to comply with the EU legislation on VAT applied to member states, which makes a sharp distinction between digital goods (images made of impalpable bits) and tangible objects (images printed on palpable paper), thus taxing them slightly differently – bureaucrats love to wallow in such byzantine subtleties. Fortunately enough I have several websites, so I can place the impalpable stuff on one of them and the palpable stuff on another.

The novelty: Tarots on demand


While I was at it I also designed a couple of sets of author-signed tarots to be printed on demand.
It posed some challenges such as finding out the proper paper, learning how to laminate it, improvising a device to cut them out precisely by hand and round up the corners comme il faut, finding the right boxes to dress them up appropriately for their travel to the customer… live and learn 🙂

Have a look at them – you’ll find an (almost) classical deck as well as a retro-steampunk one with a pinch of humor scattered here and there – the latter, I confess, being definitely my favorite 😀

Dante’s Inferno Project

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reposted
It has been quite challenging to produce (with the help of Midjourney) some spectacular and dramatic imagery inspired by the Inferno of Dante’s Divina Commedia.

Dante’s Inferno is a fascinating journey through the nine circles of Hell. This journey isn’t just for kicks; it’s about confronting the consequences of sin and understanding the need for repentance to reach salvation.

Dante places there historical figures and contemporaries, passing judgment on their deeds and misdeeds. It’s a personal and political elegant revenge, wrapped up in an epic narrative. Very cool of him.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the Inferno challenges and expands the boundaries of medieval imagination, blending horror and despair with complex allegories, making it a timeless piece that speaks of the eternal complexities of ethics.


You’ll find my images here.
I enjoyed this Midjourney’s ride, I hope you will too 🙂

My first attempt with RUNWAY

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This is my first attempt to make video with AI.

WOW! I tested RUNWAY (for now just the free version), starting on some Midjourney images of mine and doing my best to add some simple movement. Just for fun (the last famous words… 🙂 ).
The results look pretty promising, – at least to me – although the free version doesn’t allow movies longer than a few seconds.

Here I used this image

and a quite generic prompt “(scuba floating gently away under water with fishes)”.

. Then I reversed the clip for I liked better the scuba coming in rather then fading out.


And here… voilà Charon’s boat stuck in a hellish cave while the souls of the dead are waiting…


In this case I used the brush option to show where and which elements of the image should be involved in the motion: astounding! intuitive, quick and easy. Easier than by prompt.

The Krampus Parade

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It was quite cool to recreate with Midjourney a Krampus night 🙂

What is a Krampus?

It’s a big hairy creature, a blend of beast and human, with horns, a long pointed tongue, fangs, and a very convincing devilish look. The roots of the tradition date to an unspecified pre-christian era, from the European alpine regions.
Several centuries back the heathen Krampus folklore was engulfed into the Christmas tradition as a dark counterpart to St. Nicholas, to remind (mostly the children, but not only) of the possible effects of being naughty rather than nice.
Dozens of such ominous half-goat, half-demon creatures roam the streets during the Christmas season (5th-6th December) rattling chains and bells to warn or punish those who haven’t behaved properly (actually all the bystanders, not a bad assumption 😉 ).
The Krampus parade annual event is really a spine-chilling and oddly fascinating show: it takes more than a while to realize that inside those sinister figures there are playful men that every now and then stop and take off their demonic horned heads to drink a beer or play with absolutely delighted children.

The dark and the wild

Have a look at my AI & I collection and enjoy the gothic artistic side of the Krampus depicted by flogging MidJourney long enough.
13 beautifully suggestive images – occasionally with a hint of humor,

The practical and the funny

If you want to have a look at the real side of the ‘Krampusses’ – to balance the macabre with the fun – just look at my editorial images of the “backstage” of the annual Krampus Run in Munich These are 100% real, live, no AI involved.

The participants take their Krampus get-ups very seriously and spend a lot of money throughout the year to bring the evilness of their creation to perfection: elaborated barbaric fur outfits, heavy artistically carved wooden masks, monstrous horns, long lolling tongues – and more, much more. It’s a great experience to watch those big friendly guys happy even if exhausted by the fatigue of wearing those incredibly heavy costumes, graciously posing for a selfie and accepting kindly the curiosity of the viewers.

As in so many other occurrences, here too the AI complements admirably a professionally used camera, the one siding with fiction, the other with reality. The conflict is so often in the eye of the beholder…