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Cosmic Horror Story Art

Generative art for selected cosmic horror stories, as an excuse to play with Dalle v3 and ChatGPT v4.

Stories

Each story has its own page with story synopsis, summarized selected scenes, summary of illustration directions, and art generated for the selected scenes.

I focused on short classic horror/cosmic horror stories that are in the public domain. The initial thought was to create an illustrated short story collection, and I still may in the future. I fiddled with the generated art only minimally (e.g. regenerate like this or like that). I am interested in a generally automated process.

Stories are listed in the chronological order of generation, hopefully showing an improvement in methods and results.

Click the preview to see all art for each story.

Preview Story
Dagon, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe.
An Inhabitant of Carcosa, Ambrose Bierce.
The Yellow Sign, Robert W. Chambers.
The Rats in the Walls, H. P. Lovecraft.
Dracula's Guest, Bram Stoker.
The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs.
The Festival, H. P. Lovecraft.
In The Court Of The Dragon, Robert W. Chambers.
The Outsider, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen.
Pickman's Model, H. P. Lovecraft.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Music of Erich Zann, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Tomb, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Mask, Robert W. Chambers.
The Repairer of Reputations, Robert W. Chambers.
The Willows, Algernon Blackwood.
The Man Who Found Out, Algernon Blackwood.
The White People, Arthur Machen.
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James.
The Derelict, William Hope Hodgson.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Dunwich Horror, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Colour Out of Space, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Whisperer in Darkness, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Shadow Out of Time, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Haunter of the Dark, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Thing on the Doorstep, H. P. Lovecraft.
At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft.

Meta

Thoughts and observations:

  • Use an expert to select and describe scenes. When I did this manually (back in mid 2022 before chatgpt was available), I selected too many and did not understand the scenes well enough to describe them effectively.
  • Use separate roles for 1) scene selection and description, 2) illustration description, 3) illustration generation.
  • Use terms to motivate the consistency of description across scenes and the generation of imagery across scenes (it may help).
  • Use terms to encourage the illustrator to be specific about the details of the objects in the scene (helps a lot).
  • Generated images rarely have all elements in the description, or have them correctly, yet the images often have the right tone and are interesting.
  • The scene description must include as much detail as possible, including objects and their composition.

Thoughts on extensions:

As an extension, it might be interesting to pick one well known story and one art style and dig in deeper. Perhaps use claude to describe objects and characters in detail and then write highly detailed and consistent scenes and then artist instructions before then passing them onto dalle for generation. I think the large multi-segment approach with claude (e.g. super prompt) may help with consistency. I can imagine this producing interesting results, especially for longer multi-part stories like "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Call of Cthulhu".

Related works:

This work builds upon prior projects Bad, Bad, Bad, Good and Interviews With Technical Experts.