Tattooed gymbros working out at the beach (Gymbros 1)
I never mentioned this to anyone before but there is a long backstory of where the GymDreams8 identity came from. Although I did mention how I got the “8” of the GymDreams8, I never talked about the name “GymDreams”. So here goes.
On day way back in March 2023, I was browsing a site that shows many Stable Diffusion prompts and their results. All of the renders were terrible on the site. They were using Stable Diffusion 1.5 base models, so I’m not surprised at all.
But I took one of the prompts I found on that site and plugged into Midjourney and see what happened. I wasn’t expecting much except that one of these images came out. I was stunned as how good they looked. Before this, I had never used Midjourney for paintings, and certainly not rendering men. I didn’t expect it to be this good.
Shortly after, I wanted to post these works, and given that the prompt I used was literally something like “tattooed gymbros working out at the beach,” and for during that time, I was so certain that I would just do variations based on that prompt, I thought that it would be appropriate to have the word Gym in the name. AI is often seen as “dreaming” and “hallucinating”. The word Dream rhymes with the word Gym. Then I did some sketches with the letters G and D and see that it can form a beautiful logo, so I went with it.
That’s all there to it. It‘s not very deep. Like many of the things I do in design, often they’re just gut. But I do build on top of the brand overtime. So now you know.
I did for a while feel uncomfortable with the fact that I am somehow now stuck with the word Gym in the name, which creates expectations of a certain body type. That’s why I looked into expanding the character GD to mean something different — and GayDefiance is what I figured would work best, since there is no more expectations of what it is supposed to mean. As I wrote before, it was a name suggested by a friend. I was surprised that I could register the domain and all the usernames on social media.
I don’t know when I would ever transition the brand name completely, but I am using them all now.
For now, please enjoy this set of images, which were one of the earliest renders I made using that prompt.
Text prompts in Midjourney v5.
- Render: 2023-03-26
- Published: 2023-11-22
