Meet Karrik and Rosie, the Romantic Couple in My New Story

 

I made a picture of the main couple, Karrik Kenton Tallis and Rosie Moon in Karrik, 6^th Book in my SciFi Thriller series Taxyon Space.

I created individual components of the picture using text prompts with Stable Diffusion in NightCafe.studio. For my Science fiction stories, I prefer to make characters with natural expressions rather than polished beauties. Finding a suitable facial expression can take multiple attempts.

The image for Rosie emerged early in my tests. I liked her expression. She is an energetic and friendly person. Further tests did not give faces with better expressions.

Karrik was more difficult. He is a young alien man with green skin and his hair is dyed flame-orange. It’s not easy to get non-natural skin colors in text-to-image programs. Often, the resulting images look like cartoon characters instead of ‘real’ people.  

You can evolve images, however, that process tends to smooth away the natural expression and also mutes the green color of his face.

My solution is to grab the image with the most appropriate expression and physical characteristics. Often the eyes need to be touched up in PhotoShop or Gimp. Again, I discovered that AI to improve faces tends to smooth out the face and remove the natural expression.

A second problem was the clothes. The original image had a green-skinned man with a bare chest despite including ‘wearing white shirt’ in the text prompt. I failed to evolve the image to include a shirt. Instead, I used inpainting to create clothes. It works, sort of. My tests failed to make a white shirt. Also, the face degrades, becoming paler and less natural.

My solution for Karrik’s image was to cut out the shirt and add it to the best image for his face. Then, I corrected his eyes to whiten the green eyeballs and change the iris color to blue.

 

Karrik

The fates of six people are at stake in this SciFi adventure and romance.

Karrik Kenton Tallis, Third of the Flaming Comets, endures a miserable existence in a hospice on his home planet. Unable to walk or speak more than a single word, he misses his older brothers and is unaware of their sacrifice to ensure his care. He cherishes a faint hope of recovering his health.

Karrik’s life improves when his brothers return to Rishalt with their human companions. Alarik, First of the Triad, is escorting Phoebe Wong with her brother and a mysterious alien object for an audience with Prime Jadel. The middle brother, Baswin, is traveling home with Holly and Rosie Moon. The Moon sisters are enrolled in an experimental program to train human psychics to navigate in hyperspace and relieve Earth’s governments of their onerous reliance on Warrish tripilots. Rosie, a psychic healer, desires to help Karrik despite the conflict with her duty to humanity.

But the water world of Rishalt holds many hazards, both above and beneath the waves. Can the alien treasure help the three brothers to conquer the challenges and unite with their chosen partners? Read the scintillating story of the Flaming Comet brothers to learn the answers.

Buy at a discount from my Webstore: HERE

Karrik is also available at other retailers: BookStores.