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Description
Crew. Oil paintings with figures inspired by J. C. Leyendecker (tall and lean), but in the style of hyperrealism.

gymdreams8.com/blog/crew-yale/

Draped in their blue and white uniforms, the college crew team basks in the summer sun, their muscles relaxing after intense rowing. They share light-hearted banter and hearty laughter, their camaraderie shining as bright as their perspiration-drenched foreheads.

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Recently, a friend posted a couple of paintings depicting men from the crew team. Those couple of paintings reminded me of some of my friends from my college days, as well as memories I had with some of them. I thought that I’ll make some paintings of my own, with Leyendecker as the inspiration.

I have never mentioned this before — no matter what mix of artists’ styles I incorporate into my Midjourney paintings, there’s always a touch of Leyendecker in there. Even a tiny smidge, like 0.1, can give the figures that taller, leaner look I’m so drawn to.

Maybe this clears up the big question about why so many of my Midjourney renders have that vintage, yellowish tint. You see, all the Leyendecker works that were likely used as training data for Midjourney were old, hence the golden tones. Even though I was really just after his signature lean figures, his retro color palette also found its way into my work. Of course, I’d take a stab at tweaking the colors in Lightroom, but let’s be real — it’s not always a slam dunk.

These were rendered with SDXL, so they didn’t have the same color issue as MJ.

SDXL with Automatic1111

Rendering SDXL with Automatic1111 originally was fairly complicated, but after further research, it appears that the workflow can be greatly simplified due to some additional extensions. (Note: now A1111 supports SDXL direclty so you don’t need to do this anymore)

I also took the opportunity to test out some new beta SDXL models. These paintings were not rendered with the Base SDXL model, but rather the RunDiffusionXL model, which is currently in beta.

In terms of technical parameters:

- I didn’t use hires fix. The renders from SDXL came out pretty nicely, and when I used hires fix previously, the quality didn’t improve dramatically.
- I didn’t use ADetailer or Face Editor to fix faces. When I tried to do that in the past, they had made some of the images worse, even though some of them did improve.
- My recommendation is that if you do decide to use these extensions to automatically in-paint faces, you should always select the option to save the before-fix image when working with SDXL.

Tech

- SDXL Base: RunDiffusionXL Beta
- 50 steps, DPM++ SDE Karras, CFG 7
- 1024x1024
- SDXL Refiner 1.0, 10 steps (20%)
- Post Upscale: Topaz Gigapixel AI HQ 4x: 4096x4096
- Post: Adobe Lightroom color correction
- Post: Adobe Photoshop AI (limb fix)

gymdreams8.com/blog/crew-yale/

Crew
Oil paintings inspired by the men of J. C. Leyendecker, in the style of hyperrealism, with Stable Diffusion and SDXL
August 24, 2023.
51 images.

Description
Crew. Oil paintings with figures inspired by J. C. Leyendecker (tall and lean), but in the style of hyperrealism.

gymdreams8.com/blog/crew-yale/

Draped in their blue and white uniforms, the college crew team basks in the summer sun, their muscles relaxing after intense rowing. They share light-hearted banter and hearty laughter, their camaraderie shining as bright as their perspiration-drenched foreheads.

--

Recently, a friend posted a couple of paintings depicting men from the crew team. Those couple of paintings reminded me of some of my friends from my college days, as well as memories I had with some of them. I thought that I’ll make some paintings of my own, with Leyendecker as the inspiration.

I have never mentioned this before — no matter what mix of artists’ styles I incorporate into my Midjourney paintings, there’s always a touch of Leyendecker in there. Even a tiny smidge, like 0.1, can give the figures that taller, leaner look I’m so drawn to.

Maybe this clears up the big question about why so many of my Midjourney renders have that vintage, yellowish tint. You see, all the Leyendecker works that were likely used as training data for Midjourney were old, hence the golden tones. Even though I was really just after his signature lean figures, his retro color palette also found its way into my work. Of course, I’d take a stab at tweaking the colors in Lightroom, but let’s be real — it’s not always a slam dunk.

These were rendered with SDXL, so they didn’t have the same color issue as MJ.

SDXL with Automatic1111

Rendering SDXL with Automatic1111 originally was fairly complicated, but after further research, it appears that the workflow can be greatly simplified due to some additional extensions. (Note: now A1111 supports SDXL direclty so you don’t need to do this anymore)

I also took the opportunity to test out some new beta SDXL models. These paintings were not rendered with the Base SDXL model, but rather the RunDiffusionXL model, which is currently in beta.

In terms of technical parameters:

- I didn’t use hires fix. The renders from SDXL came out pretty nicely, and when I used hires fix previously, the quality didn’t improve dramatically.
- I didn’t use ADetailer or Face Editor to fix faces. When I tried to do that in the past, they had made some of the images worse, even though some of them did improve.
- My recommendation is that if you do decide to use these extensions to automatically in-paint faces, you should always select the option to save the before-fix image when working with SDXL.

Tech

- SDXL Base: RunDiffusionXL Beta
- 50 steps, DPM++ SDE Karras, CFG 7
- 1024x1024
- SDXL Refiner 1.0, 10 steps (20%)
- Post Upscale: Topaz Gigapixel AI HQ 4x: 4096x4096
- Post: Adobe Lightroom color correction
- Post: Adobe Photoshop AI (limb fix)

gymdreams8.com/blog/crew-yale/

Crew
Oil paintings inspired by the men of J. C. Leyendecker, in the style of hyperrealism, with Stable Diffusion and SDXL
August 24, 2023.
51 images.