Wrestlers by the Docks
Wrestling Bros
This is a series of relatively simpler paintings that I made before evolving them into the more stylized versions later on:
When I posted in-progress images in the past, some people would comment that they prefer those images over the more explored versions. In some ways, I can understand that, as my early explorations are usually much simpler in their concept and execution. I like them also — I wouldn’t have push the ideas further unless I see that I could extend and add more to them. So in many ways, these early renders are the most pure expression of the ideas.
Scene
It might be worth mentioning why there are wrestlers at the docks.
Originally, I tried to depict a couple of sailors from the navy wrestling at the docks. I first put them in navy uniforms, to have a fight / hand to hand combat / wrestling. But I didn’t like how they came out, and since I have been meaning to try out the wrestling singlet LoRA anyway, I put them in wrestling singlets.
Also, if you have worked with any AI tools — e.g. Midjourney or Stable Diffusion — then you know how terrible they are when it comes to logical placements of limbs, especially when the figures are involved in a fight. So what I ended up doing is something more friendly and less violent — to have them hug and hold each other. It’s homoerotic, but totally friendly.
The wrestling singles completely took over the prompt for sailor uniforms, but the battleship in the background still hints on the fact that they are sailors, ever so slightly. I gave them tattoos, which push that hint of military further, though no more — since the core them and idea behind this is about wrestling and not the navy.
Tech
As these paintings were made during my idea exploration phase, they were rendered at much lower quality settings — just enough for me to see if something could work. Euler a is an excellent sampler for this purpose. Use it to make quick renders. Even if you ultimately decide to use SDE for the correct style, Euler a is still a great sampler to use to see how your keywords will be interpreted. Of course, if you’re already on a fast GPU, e.g. RTX 4090, then you can use a higher quality sampler like SDE for your explorations.
Parameters
Tech: Euler a, 30 steps, CFG 6, 512x512, Virile Fusion v2 (Model hash: f1de8faa49, Model: virileFusion_v20), Denoising 0.5. Clip skip 1. VAE vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.vae. ADetailer face_yolov8n.pt. Hirex upscale 1.5 (768x768), 15 steps,4x_NMKD-Siax_200k. CN0 Shuffle. Topaz Gigapixel HQ 4x (3072x3072). Adobe Lightroom (color correction). Adobe Photoshop AI (inpainting and edits). Lora hashes: wrestlingsinglet_v1: 0c2b261a033e.
Images
- Instagram Set 1. Decided to not post this image to IG because of an issue. I kept the image here so you can see why. It’s very subtle. In place of Set 1, I made some new renderings based on a similar prompt, but evolved further: Wrestling Sailors by the Docks: Kiss
- Instagram Set 2
- Instagram Set 3
Set 1
Found an issue about this image when I was about to post to Instagram, so I replaced it with some new renderings. I’m keeping this image here so you can see why I have decided to not post it to IG. It’s very subtle.
Images
