The Fleshmelt Project pt.4 - Rootsman & Octospider

We swim deeper

and discover some tasty twisty mutations in the depths of my imagination.

Previously on the Fleshmelt Project

• Part 1: Fleshy Red Mother & the PhotoBash
• Part 2: Disparate influences
• Part 3: Mawr Red Flesh, Demonwebs & Skull Fetus

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The fleshmelt project left off last time with a fanged skull biting the umbilical cord of a fetus (said cord also connected to the skull).

I haven't been talking about the meaning behind the Fleshmelt project, and in general I like my art to speak for itself. People hear different things depending on the shape of their mental cavity and I like to let my weirdness bounce around to find its own echoes inside. That being said, this entire project is about me confronting some insecurity demons that have kept me from ever seriously trying to be an artist as a trade. I will always be an artist of course - I create 10 things before breakfast as a rule. Most of them impossible.

Anyway back to the skull cutting the umbilical cord. This is the point the fleshmelt project cut free from its earthly tethers and ascended into realms of weirdness previously unimaginable even to me. I began to see glimpses through the shroud of where this was taking me. Join me on the next steps of the journey.

Again painting on top of the previous scene to push the project in a new direction, I removed the fetus and began to pull out a fleshy pumpkin-headed face and body with trailing entrails or roots instead of legs. I dubbed this figure "Rootsman". I also added a creature to the right that will morph from dinosaur-esque to more of a beaked skeleton.

(I say "painting" as a shorthand for digital manipulation in PhotoShop, this does include the brush tool but I use smudge and clone stamp a lot as well. In this case I was using clonestamp to pull red tentacly shapes from other parts of the piece to make the body.)

I worked on the new painting direction until I arrived here:

Then I did an AI style transfer run (deepdreamgenerator.com / DeepStyle v.2) using the above as my base image and the original Fleshy Red Mother crop as style image. First generation result of this:

I painted on top of that result until I ended up here - mostly filling in the undefined areas with octopus-y tentacles:

Then another AI style transfer generation, again using the original fleshy red mother as style image - here is that raw output:

Painting on top of the above result, I started to bring out a weird head with an octospider mouth above the rootsman. End result of this round of painting:

Using the above as a base image, I did a 3rd generation of AI style transfer using a different crop of the fleshy red mother as style image. This crop intentionally included some of the black background from the original fleshy red mother painting, so the darker areas in my painting base image turned out black- raw output of that:

Next I decided the rootsman was having an out of body experience and went back to the previous generation and made a copy of the rootsman floating above his body - a few different ways of playing around with this:

On to the Octospider

Starting from the last generation of AI style transfer that brought in the areas of black, I decided to bring out the octospider I was seeing in the mouth of the strange head above the rootsman. Result of this painting session:

First generation AI style transfer using the above as base image and the fleshy red mother as style image (using a crop that didn't contain black background portions, to force the AI to fill in the dark areas with red flesh shapes). Raw output:

I did two more generations of back and forth painting & AI style transfer. Here is the end of that process - using the third generation of painting as base image, here is the raw output of the third generation of style transfer on the octospider:

Stay weird Hive

That is enough fleshy red insanity for now. Until next time Hive :)