Latex Flowers
A recurring theme that I explore is the contrast and duality of hard and soft. This is the perfect example of it — a hairy muscular man wearing latex pants in black and yellow, but juxtaposed against delicate organic flowers.
It accentuates the soft, delicate, and emotional side of a man — qualities that we, as gay men, are often trying to hide when many of us grew up being bullied — at least, that’s how I felt growing up. But I find myself increasingly drawn to men who are not afraid to show their emotions this way.
When you look at my Construction series, it depicts hardy men showing a soft side of themselves through hugs and sleep. If you look at the my Kiss series, it shows men expressing their passion for one another with very delicate kisses. Those are the same type of qualities that I try to express with these images with flowers and latex.
Tech
I made these images using the workflow I have described in my Fire series. You can read about it in Fire - Part 2 - Stable Diffusion
Instead of using fire and smoke as my image inputs, I made some abstract flower compositions with Midjourney to influence the colors and backgrounds of the final image. The result is this contrast of something hard vs something soft.
Tech: Text prompts with Midjourney + Text prompts with Stable Diffusion: 25 steps, DPM++ SDE Karras, CFG 6, 512x512, Airfucks Wild Mix v1, Denoising 0.5. CN0 Reference Only. CN1 Shuffle. ADetailer face_yolov8n.pt. Hires 1.5 (768x768), 10 steps, 4x_NMKD-Siax_200k. Post: Topaz Gigapixel HQ 4x (3072x3072), Adobe Lightroom color correction