My entry into LMAC’s 102nd week, tells the story of love between two Golem Automatons existing in a post apocalyptic steampunk universe.
In the long distant past a race of curious beings died out in a cataclysm leaving only technology and photography for the industrious LIL Bots to study. Curious to learn of their own origin, they built the creations set out by the ancients, finally discovering that they were created by these long extinct creatures.
They experimented for a thousand years, creating creatures of varied nature, some hunting their creators in rage at being brought forth into a life without purpose. But the LIL Bots simply built more LIL Bots until they were enough to overwhelm and destroy these first failed experiments.
Finally they built Kamila, a giantess who could learn, and spoke in the language of the ancients. But she shed eternal tears of blood, roaming the landscape looking for the sublime - picking the flowers of the Carina tree and drinking from glacial melt. Yet nothing could quench her tears, so the LIL Bots set upon a task to build her a companion from stone and flesh.
The dipping sun sparked crimson clouds to fire, mirroring Kamila's tears as she beheld Morganite who the LIL Bots had built for her. She smiled for the first time in millennia. The blood dried around her eyes as the sun settled to gloaming and the soft night whispered of rebirth.
The LIL Bots danced, not knowing this feeling that possessed them.
I really love the synthesis of art and story, so I hope you will forgive me this spontaneous outpouring of steampunk romance fiction. I guess I'm just a strange soppy guy at heart 😂
Let's move on to the collage art process and sources.
Resources used:
I found a variety of images on both LMAC Image Library and pixabay to make the collage:
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N.B. I have set 2% beneficiary each to @quantumg @donroberts @eve66 and @evagavilan2 for using their images :) Creative Process:Step 1: Voodoo Doll-Golem-Megalon First I rotated and then cut out around the voodoo doll image as I knew I wanted to make some type of creepy steampunk Megalon/Golem hybrid for the LMAC robots to be working on.
This took a lot of time using the paths tool, and as I looked at the cut out image, I realized it didn't really have that steampunk look I was going for so I decided to use that handiest of tools, deep dream generator. After finding the look I wanted, I realized I'd made a rookie mistake... deep dream generator doesn't recognise transparency so the transparent background had come out white 😂  I added the image that had been given a white background in deep dream generator to GIMP and added an alpha channel with transparency then used the fuzzy select tool to isolate only the white areas outside the image, and the small area between the voodoo doll's legs. Then I deleted the highlighted area returning it back to transparent. Looking at the image it still didn't scream steampunk to me so I hunted down a steampunk-looking hat on pixabay and put it through a filter I'd spotted on deep dream which worked like a charm.
Unfortunately, the same issue happened with the transparency so I had to use the same fix, but no bother, it only took a minute... gotta love the fuzzy select tool 😅 Step 2: The Factory and Giantess I wanted to make the scene more dramatic to reflect the love scene taking place between the two giants of the steampunk setting. I started by experimenting with cutting out the factory at the horizon line, and after trying to include the trees discovered that there was simply too much white noise to deal with in and around the branches. So I settled on cutting lines closer to the factory and cliff area to allow a better contrast with the new sky.
After settling on a cut of the factory I liked, I wanted to give the image a fiery sunset/dusk light effect to fit in with the sky I added from @evagavilan2 beautiful picture. So I added a layer filled with pure red (HTML notation: ff0000) and set the mode to 'soft light' and then set the opacity to around 17, changing the colour saturation to give the factory area that slight red-ish hue of sunset.
Then I cut the fire image to remove the logs so that flames could be flaring from the factory's towers as the LMAC worker robots danced around the feet of the Voodoo Golum.
I added the Voodoo Golem standing in the construction area and @eve66's excellent Kamila doll image at the horizon using the '3D Transform' tool in GIMP so that they were looking at each other. I then added the steampunk clock on the side of the building, the airship docked above the factory and the LMAC bots dancing around their creation. Finally, I experimented with the artistic filters in GIMP to give the whole image a cartoon look, and settled on the version to the far right out of the three.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip into the steampunk universe of the Lil bots and their giant Golem creations. Thanks 🙂
All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit. I have set @lmac as 20% beneficiary of this post's rewards to help support the community. If you have enjoyed this creative post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content.
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