Ginger Flowers
This series explores the more emotional side of men — with men in shirts and shorts with floral prints against a field of flowers, and just a touch of masculinity expressed through their ginger beards
Unlike the men seen in Latex Flowers, where I express the duality of hard and soft, the men in this Ginger Flowers set are more of a soft-on-soft variety, with a touch of masculine hardiness expressed through their ginger beards.
If you follow my Instagram stories, then you’ll know that I love the men that @zakalwe404 creates. Besides the fact that Zakalwe404 always takes extra effort to add a bit of imperfection to the men to make them more realistic, all of the men have this look that’s really hard to describe — in a je ne sai quoi kind of way. The only way that I could put into words, is that they have this sweetness in their facial expressions that remind me of the college sweethearts or boy crush I had when I was younger.
We chat a lot on Discord, and we often share works and workflows with each other. Yesterday, he shared one of his latest works of men with ginger hair that are framed by unfinished ink illustrations, using a technique that he developed on his own (Instagram).
I asked if he would mind if I take his prompts and gave my own spin on it, and he kindly agreed to allow me to play with them. So that’s what I’m posting today — the men of Zakalwe404, with that look that I just couldn’t describe, but rendered in a way that’s similar to my own style, using techniques that I developed on my own that uses images in control nets to control color and styles. I will now simply refer to this technique as ref-shuffle, so you can look them up more easily on my site.
Here are some of the results. I will post 3 sets of images on Instagram, with more variations on my site.
I’m also using a new checkpoint model for this — Virile Fantasy, a new model developed by Scratchproof, who is behind all the Virile models (Virile Fusion, Virile Reality, etc) that you would typically see that I use when I create works about gay men in Stable Diffusion.
Tech: Text prompts with Midjourney (for Control Nets) + Text prompts with Stable Diffusion: 30 steps, Euler a, CFG 5, 512x512, Virile Fantasy v1.1, Denoising 0.5, Clip skip 2. CN0 Shuffle. CN1 Reference Only. ADetailer with neg prompts mediapipe_face_full. Hires 1.5x (768x768), 15 steps, 4x_NMKD-Siax_200k. Post: Topaz Gigapixel HQ 4x (3072x3072), Adobe Lightroom color correction.
27 images on Instagram. 40 on gymdreams8.com - link in bio.
