Recently I have been working on the latest addition to our Chronicles series, a Banshee character named Keeva. She also represents the archetype of one of our playable classes, and she’s supposed to be both alluring and disturbing at the same time, which is never an easy combination to pull off.
As the lore describes her:
“She was as beautiful as she was terrible to behold. A gown of gossamer white adorned her body, pale as the flesh beneath, save for the red upon her neck, for her throat had been cut wide open, yet she smiled softly. Her dead eyes, glassy and pale, seemed to stare through me, and her long black hair flowed out around her, as if underwater. She was both maiden and monster.”
What makes the generative AI workflow used to create her particularly interesting this time around is its more “artisanal” approach. Instead of relying on LoRas, IP adapters, or other procedural methods, her likeness was developed and maintained primarily through a series of sketches (like the ones included in this set) and composited guidance images, in an iterative sketch -> generate -> overpaint -> generate -> rinse and repeat sequence.
The process did have the uncanny feeling of working with a collaborator or sidekick, bouncing ideas back and forth, and even pushing each other to capture that extra bit of nuance.
In addition to the handcrafted sketches, the building blocks for the composited roughs were generated with Leonardo’s Phoenix model, and the intermediate steps as well as the finals were generated using SDXL. The shading style reminiscent of comic-book covers was enhanced by a ControlNet-based style transfer of some of our previously created reference artwork, and final color-grading was done manually.
And the Chronicles episode she appears in: