I’ve had a lot of success with Alastrina’s prayer card. I’ll show off a few of these in an upcoming post once I get the art hammered out, but with this being a Sunday and during Ramadan, I wanted to show some prototypes for her prayers. Plus, it works as a good “how you do” snapshot on the art process.

Gemini seems to work better when asked for clean-line comic art style, at least on the initial working renders. Realism, or even fantasy realism as it were, seriously limits the creativity and I tend to just see the same image with extra body parts or something that was a complete waste of all the water I keep hearing AI guzzle. So at least for initial pass, and, honestly, maybe for the final project, the comic art style may be how it stands. That and Alastrina generally looks more pissed off if she’s in fantasy render versus comic render, which is weird.

One thing I do have to acknowledge is that Nano Banana tends to be conservative. Unless you specifically ask for a change, it will adapt the last made image to the new prompt. Even if you take the subject from flipping burgers in a greasy diner to conducting an orchestra on the dark side of the moon, if you don’t specify that there are no burgers on the moon, there will be a hamburger sitting in a crater, somewhere near the trombone section. So since my chats are trained on what each character looks like, rather than start a new image and lose Gemini’s understanding of what they look like, I do have to remove a lot of hamburgers. Since I’m borrowing light artistic borrows of extant religions to make up something for Alastrina, there are a lot of blended elements from faiths that range between “that’s cool” and “burn the blasphemous heretic!”

The inspiration for the prayer cards includes a prayer rug with tassels on the sides of it. So Alastrina, deep in prayer with a burning incense stick and a meditation candle serves as kind of a proof of concept that, at least for her prayer arts, she is not actively battling a monster. Of course, she is doing this in combat, but adding the complexity of yeti and dragons receiving communion while also trying to bash or roast her didn’t seem like a worthwhile ask. This also served as the base image for all of her renders.

The baptismal font is very nice, as is the marble inlaid design on the floor. What is she doing with the pool? Haven’t decided yet, but this is a good base image for something, I’m sure. And I want you to compare this image because the next one heavily borrowed some hamburgers:

I had to remove the pews and cathedral background, but you may notice that the marble inlaid floor showed back up. As did basically the entire plinth under the yoni. Not convinced the rusty sword is the best look, but I do like that she is making an offering and the spilling offering is enchanting the sword in the basin. Gemini did double check that I really wanted Shiva in this image, and I said I did; I’m happy to drop little “hey, she’s totally doing…” for those in the audience who recognize.

This image is for Sustaining Faith, her single target heal spell. Who are all these totems and icons? Only the AI knows for sure. Did a good job on turning her around, though. By this point I learned to remove hamburgers, so the Shiva lingam didn’t make the transition to the home altar.

The powered up version of Sustaining Belief is Healing Wave. Here she’s going full druid, because why borrow major faiths when you can borrow really any faith? I do really like the creative aspect here of using AI, and yes, I do say that somewhat tongue in cheek because I know it is aping what it was trained on – but at the same time it has zero bias against aping whatever you asked it for.

Gemini has been kinda borked today, so I’ll post what I have and continue to generate a few more since it cares to work right now. But wanted to show off what I was doing. Please do feel free to share inspiration where you can on your faiths and I’ll gladly include the ones that render the best.