Leather, Books, and Suspenders
If you’ve spent enough time in the leather community, then you’ll find that there’s an underlying assumption that — a least for the old guards — leather must be a certain way. Leather must be black, you can’t wear them with sneakers, etc etc.
I want to change that preconceived notion — for me, leather is anything you want it to be. For me, leather is freedom to experiment and explore. I like to think of it as “boys just want to have fun”. In some ways, the fact that the people tend to be more open to colors and designs is what turned me into latex originally. But you know, really, what I came to realize as I got older is that it really doesn’t matter. All these rules… I’m not quite sure where they came from… but I know that rules are meant to be broken.
So here… white leather, with shorts, suspenders, leather bound books, and boots. Because why not? If I saw this twunk growing up, I would absolutely be all over him. These paintings depict a scene that could absolutely occur. These armchairs are of a very specific design… ok I will not go there. But if you know, you know.
Stable Diffusion img2img with Midjourney source image made in April 2023.
- Steps: 50, Sampler: DPM++ 2S a Karras, CFG scale: 7, Size: 1024x1024, Model hash: 31e35c80fc, Model: sd_xl_base_1.0, VAE hash: 63aeecb90f, VAE: sdxl_vae.safetensors, Denoising strength: 0.7
- ControlNet 0: "Module: dw_openpose_full, Model: thibaud_xl_openpose_256lora (14288071), Weight: 1, Resize Mode: Crop and Resize, Low Vram: False, Processor Res: 1024, Guidance Start: 0, Guidance End: 1, Pixel Perfect: False, Control Mode: Balanced"
- face_editor_enabled: True, face_editor_face_size: 1024, face_editor_upscaler: None
- Automatic1111 Version: v1.6.0
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Image Source and Workflow
Image 1. This was the original painting I made in April 2023. As per usual, I added Leyendecker in the mix to influence the body type and style. Usually, only 20% is needed. If you go over 20%, then there might be too much influence in terms of artistic style also — which may or may not be what you’re after.
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Image 2. Using the original painting as the image source, I described what I wanted in Stable Diffusion img2img, and also added an OpenPose control net so that the denoising won’t change how to figure poses.
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Image 3. The image with shorts is what I personally prefer, but I opted to start the set with Image 1 because of the friendlier gaze. For posting on social media, a more approachable image seems to help with engagement better, even if artisitcally it’s not the most representative of my intentions.
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Image 4. I decided to utilize this opportunity to show why I don’t use Midjourney as the final rendering step anymore. I still use it for my professional design work, so I keep my Pro subscription active. Since I do many works that’re under the condition of NDA, it won’t be possible for me to use a regular membership, since that would mean the renders would show up on the public feed.
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Image 5. As you can see, even though the quality is fairly good, you can see that the men just lack the punch for a gay audience.
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Image 6. Render quality is not the issue here. But just look at how much clothes he has put on. Excessively so.
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Image 7. For leather, it’s less of an issue. But if you work on sports, this type of aggressive pre-filfering is why I suggest gay AI artists to look into Stable Diffusion instead.
You’re drastically limiting your possibilities by sticking with Midjourney as your only engine. You can try an MJ to SD workflow here also. This allows you to keep the dreaming aspect of Midjourney, but with the quality and finish of Stable Diffusion.
