Bringing my series of deep sea creature / AI style transfer & painting experiments to a close, I present the Hairy Anglerfish. I spent a ton of time on this one capturing the variation in texture and weird details and I am rather happy with how it turned out :)

Fun Facts

The long filaments or "hairs" that come off the body and fins of the hairy anglerfish are sensory organs, acting like a cat's whiskers and helping it detect when prey is within striking range.
The huge distended stomach is true to life, the anglerfish's jaws dislocate to open wide and its stomach can extend to accommodate prey larger than the anglerfish!
This is a female anglerfish. The males are tiny parasitic creatures that attach themselves to a female, basically a small appendage that provides sperm and cannot obtain sustenance by itself.

Process and Variants

First a few variants of the final version.

This one is my final generation of painting combined with a style transfer run using the painting as the base image and the original reference photo as the style image. This is more true to life in terms of the colors vs. the redder version I shared above. The background here is just a simple gradient I made in PhotoShop

To get from the above version with a gradient background to the first image I shared in the post, I used a style transfer run using a photo of a vampire squid as the style image - I posted my vampire squid painting previously, and I knew that the reference photo of the vampire squid produced a really cool bubbles-in-the-light background. Here is a process shot showing the output of the vampire squid style, you can see the vampire squid style image here as a very small thumbnail. I don't own the vampire squid photo, just providing a low res version here to illustrate my process.

You can see how this style image adds little floaty bits and bubbles in the water - I used this to layer back over my painting to create the background in the final image I shared first. I also took a small amount of the red color from this layer by blending with blend mode soft light at a reduced opacity to get the warmer tones in the final image.

Some harder light / less realistic variants

I had fun playing around in PhotoShop making some other versions that I think would work well as a t-shirt or hoody design.

Early Process

When I first started this piece I used a 16:9 widescreen layout to match the other pieces in this series of deep sea creatures. This basically meant I cropped out a lot of the reference photo I was working from. My first generation of painting with the reference image I was using (I don't own the reference image, low res version shown here to illustrate my process):

First generation style transfer run (deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle v.2) - this used the rough quick paint above as the base image, and the reference photo as style image. Raw AI output:

Then I decided to expand the canvas and paint the full fish from my reference photo. Here is the first generation of style transfer done after I expanded my painting base image, ran through style transfer using the same reference photo as the style image again:

From there I spent a ton of time on the digital painting. The fins and long filaments were a particularly fun challenge.

Stay Weird Hive

Until we meet again