Leather and Harley
I have been working on a leather series. This subject matter is close to my heart. When I used to go out, I always go to leather bars — but not necessarily for the same reasons most gay men do. I just like that people at leather bars are more down to earth compared to the regular bars. The men are also nicer.
I’m also very particular about my leather. All of my gears are custom tailored. The fit is important to me so there’s really no other way. When I used to live in NYC, the guys at The Leather Man know me by name because of how often I’m there.
Yesterday, I came across someone’s photo with a motorcycle. It inspired me to make some paintings with motorcycle. I think that most of the time people think that I was just making stuff up, but I do really get inspired often to make works. I could tell you the backstory of almost all images that I post.
These were originally going to be the later part of the series — mostly to follow some type of progression. But I know that if I told someone that I would work on something inspired by their photos and those paintings never showed up until months later, it would seem like I never intended to work on them. So I have moved them up for post-processing first, with the rest of the series to follow afterwards.
- Stable Diffusion with SDXL
- img2img based on an unpublished Midjourney image rendered on April 12, 2023 - mostly for color and motorcycle placement
- Steps: 50, Sampler: DPM++ 2S a Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 4096868748, Size: 1024x1024, Model hash: 31e35c80fc, Model: sd_xl_base_1.0, VAE hash: 63aeecb90f, VAE: sdxl_vae.safetensors, Denoising strength: 0.7
- face_editor_upscaler: R-ESRGAN 4x+, face_editor_tilt_adjustment_threshold: 40
- Automatic1111 Version: v1.6.0
- Post: Topaz Gigapixel Standard 4x, Adobe Lightroom
Images
Images
Image Source
The first image in this set served as the source image for img2img to the Leather and Harley series I’ve posted on my main account today.
They were rendered with Midjourney v5 on April 12, 2023, before the GymDreams8 identity existed. I never posted them because they were made before I started posting my works publicly, and there are plenty of new works that I am working on.
This first image I used to drive the new works is itself a Midjourney image prompt render, based on two images also rendered with Midjourney. I do this often when I used to use MJ to make works with a male focus. When I like something I made but it’s not quite there yet, I would supply that image as an image source to influnce new images. So the final images in fact might come from several iterations of image generations.
Men in full leather with Harley-Davidson bikes. Oil paintings with impressionist motifs. Rendered with Midjourney v5.
