Splinterlands Art Contest Week 312: Shock Trooper

(EDIT: I went ahead and uploaded the upscaled image)

This is my entry for the weekly Splinterlands contest found HERE

Here is the original card art:

This was created using generative AI, using nothing but free tools. It is super easy. Just for fun, I'll go step by step through the process.

Step 1: Go to www.starryai.com (another site I use is https://creator.nightcafe.studio/). You can create a free account by submitting your email address or Google account. I do not have the app actually loaded on my computer, I just use their website and work completely off my Firefox browser. So, I'd avoid those AppStore and Google Play links at the bottom.

Step 2: Acquire some Lumens. Yes, the account is free. But they do have a currency that they use called Lumens. Fortunately, once a day you may log in to the site and click on a button to get 5 FREE LUMENS. If you look at my account I have over 800 Lumens and have never paid a dime for any of them. I just spend a lot of time on my computer every day and try to remember to come here (and Nightcafe) to get my free currency.

Step 3: Type in your text prompt. Mine was "A muscular Amazonian woman with a shield and spear surrounding by a blue electrical aura." The most important thing that determines what your final art piece looks like is the "STYLE" button on the left. Starryai has hundreds of different styles, from anime to kid drawings. I picked "Magick" because it seems to exclusively draw its art from images of hot, fantasy women. Then just hit that "Generate" button and wait a couple minutes.

Step 4: Pick your final art. For the low, low cost of 1 Lumen, it generates not just 1 but 4 images. You'll notice why I said that "Style" is more important than your "text prompt." If you look at the first image generated, which I think artistically looks much better than the one I chose. She has neither spear, nor shield, nor blue electrical aura. The text interpretation is pretty artificially dumb. But still, 4 very cool images.

That's it. You can then download any or all of the four images. You can log into your account at any later time and it will store all of your creations. The generated art is fairly low res (512 x 640 at 72 dpi). But you can spend 1 Lumen to Upscale it to 4x size. You can also spend 1 Lumen to enhance it in different ways (change to illustration, or pixelart, or hyper-realistic). Actually, I just noticed that for 1 Lumen you can re-work certain areas of the drawing as well. I'm not sure how that works...

Anyway, that's it.

It literally took me ten times as long just to write this post and screen capture those images then it took me to make the art. Just remember that with this particular site, "starryai" STYLE > PROMPT. I'm pretty sure if I type in "A cat typing on a computer keyboard" the Magick Style would just give me a series of hot sorceress chicks, possibly with cat ears.