Kingdom Death Artwork

Physical Models as the Basis of Digital Art

Digital Art
Author

John Vivian

Published

November 11, 2023

The Ghost in the Machine

Note

Click images to full-screen images and arrow keys to cycle

I made most of this artwork about ~8-9 months ago as part of an amateur writing series which I’ve written ~20 chapters of (out of 30) but only released the prologue.

Many illustrations are derived directly from the Kingdom Death miniatures themselves (see Section 2) using ControlNet within Stable Diffusion. I most often used the depth, lineart, and softedge models within ControlNet as my starting point.

Figure 1: Lion Knight Miniature

Figure 2: Several hours later

Chapter Artwork

Ladies and gentlemen
Creatures of the night
Terrestrials that are extra, lend me your ears!
Would you like to be shocked and amazed?
    The Number Twelve Looks Like You - Gallery of Thrills

Artwork I created for each chapter. One per “year” in our Kingdom Death campaign. Each piece is titled after its respective chapter. Year 7 is missing because that is when the White Speaker arrived (if you’ve played you understand).

0: Awake

1: Returning Survivors

2: Endless Screams

3: Lights in the Sky

4: The Butcher

5: Hands of Head & Murder

6: Uninvited Guest

8: Glowing Crater & Rumbling in the Dark

9: Forgotten Fear

10: Antelo(o)pes

11: Regal Visit

12: Hooded Knight & Lanterns in the Sky

13: The Lion, The Hand, and the Silver City

14: 10^9 Lion

15: (B) The Decade of Statues

16: The Butcher & The Hooded Knight Return

17: Places, Everyone

18: An Ocular Assessment, A Clearing of Passage

19: Slenderman II: Electric Boogaloo & The Triatholon of Death

20: Watched

21: Foul Play

22: Cat Scratch Fever

23: The Butcher III: Hack City

24: Hottest Hands & Darkest Nights

25: The Secret Meeting

26: Acid Rain

27: Murder She Wrote

28: Slenderman III: Catching the Boogeyman

29: Secret Meeting II: Not-So-Secret

30: Gold Smoke Knight

Miniature-based Gallery

Bow your head in awe of our creation
Bring closer his withered throne to earth
Lowering paradise within reach
    The Faceless - Autotheism Movement III: Deconsecrate

Below are all examples where the actual miniature from Kingdom Death itself was used as the basis for building the artwork, typically via ControlNet.

The Butcher model

The Butcher

The Hand model

The Hand

Slenderman model

Slenderman

The Watcher model

The Watcher

Lion God model

Lion God - ew

Gold Smoke Knight model

Gold Smoke Knight

Tools & Versioning

Silly monkeys
Give them thumbs, they make a club
To beat their brother down
    Tool - Right in Two

All art was created using a computer, several dozen pieces of software, and several hundred more hours than expected.

While I understand the deeply unsettling nature of AI, automation, and vast potential for artist abuse, these tools provided me an opportunity to explore visual media in a way I would not be able to otherwise given my technical limitations within the area. I have spent thousands of hours practicing to be a mediocre tech death drummer and several thousand other hours wasted in grad school, not learning to draw. Tools like stable diffusion allow me to combine visual art with the other thing in life I truly enjoy: swearing at the computer and package dependency hell.

I think of an interview many years ago with Hans Zimmer that surprised me. He said he wasn’t really “fluent” in any particular instrument and that he is appreciative music made its way onto computers or he would never have had the opportunity to explore a passion that brings him and many others so much joy.

  • Stable Diffusion 1.5
  • Photoshop / Photopea
  • A1111 WebUI
    • ControlNet
    • Ultimate SD Upscale
    • Segment Anything
    • Checkpoint Merger
    • Extras (for background removal)
    • Infinite Image Browser
    • Infinite Grid Generator
    • canvas-zoom
  • xformers - 0.0.18 (monkey-patched version to work with PyTorch 2.0)
  • torch - 2.0.0+cu118 (not default for A1111, look up how to do this)
  • cuDNN 8.7 (you will have to do this manually)
  • Switched from --xformers to --opt-sdp-attention --opt-channelslast

Copyright