Stelfie, a lucky traveler escaping from normal life to a dimension where everything is possible thanks to AI. A character travelling through time taking iconic selfies with legendary characters in epic landscapes walks us through his artistic journey with AI.

Greetings Stelfie, can you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? How long have you been time travelling with AI?

Stelfie is an Italian fictional character created by an Italian artist who shall remain anonymous. (Plan is to reveal myself). Stelfie’s adventure started 6th of December 2022 and he has been traveling since.

What inspired your character? How did he come about?

I have been a big fan of "Back to the Future" and once I had the opportunity to "build" a time machine, myself I felt the best way to celebrate was to have a lot of fun.
Stelfie is about that, a funny guy who takes life with an ironic approach, a lucky traveler escaping from a normal life to a dimension where everything is possible.

How long have you been creating images with AI? How long did it take you to reach a level of creating such great time travelling selfies?

I have a long history of making traditional art at first and digital art later on. I have been painting for more than two decades and I graduated from the Art school in Italy back in time. I have a good Python background and I started to mess around with machine learning 6 months ago. I used Dalle and Midjourney to try the potential and then I stumbled upon Stable Diffusion. The versatility that Stable Diffusion gives to the user is endless and because it is open source the growth and improvement rate is very high.
When I look at the first Stelfies I made I now find many flaws. Therefore, I am building up a new level of expertise on the topic and I refined and fine-tuned my techniques several times. On average to create a Stelfie I need 5 to 10 hours. (Some have taken 18h)

Can you walk us through your process for creating your selfies? How do you come up with prompts, what image generator do you use? Etc..

Step 1: Is writing ideas down. I do that because I want to have a story that the viewer can perceive by looking at the final Artwork. Details are very important to create a credible scenario and I feel the magic of Stelfie is due to the imagination of the viewer who can fancy about what happened the moment before or after the specific Stelfie was taken.
Step 2: Is drawing a sketch of the scene. I use Procreate (which is a drawing app) and, very roughly, I draw a sketch of how the overall scene adding the characters that I want in the scene, the background, the extra elements that need to be present, some info about lighting (indoor/outdoor - day/night) and so on.
I do that because I feel it is important to be consistent to the initial idea I had and having a sketch is forcing me to be faithful to that and to have control over Stable Diffusion as opposed to having Stable Diffusion drive me where it wants to go.
Step 3: Is to start a draft version with Stable Diffusion. A very basic scene where lighting, focus, exposure are not important at all. What is important is to get a basic version of the scene with the characters in.
Step 4: Is to modify that manually in Photoshop or Procreate. So with a brush tool I paint over the image to give to the characters the pose I want them to have, I add elements (very roughly), I cut/split/paste/warp and so on and then I feed the result back to Stable Diffusion to reharmonize the output.
Step 5: Is loopback between Stable Diffusion and Photoshop in order to improve the scene every step more. Then I start with the most difficult elements (faces / hair / beard / animals) and I make sure to have them done almost perfectly.
Step 6: Is to finalize the small elements with the same process as above (step 3 to 6)
Step 7: Is to manually work the lighting and the saturation making sure that the scene is coherent and harmonic.
Step 8: Is to work on the hands of the characters (if there are hands/feet in the scene)
Step 9: Is to manually add motion/tilt blur in Photoshop. This is important to create a credible scene, not a simple static shot.
Step 10: Done.

What challenges have you had working with this technology? What limitations have you encountered?

In the pre process, the difficult part is to come up with the idea.
Since each Stelfie wants to tell a story and let the viewer imagine the rest, I really spend a lot of time brainstorming in order to get the perfect idea for a character and for a scene. In the process of making the image I find it very challenging to achieve hyperrealism and to have it coherent in the overall scene lighting.
The complexity of the scene requires each main component to be treated individually. So there is not a single unique prompt (when it comes to work toward hyperrealism) for the overall scene, there are hundreds of unique prompts and hundreds of manual editing in Photoshop according to the elements that the scene has.

What benefits have you seen from working with AI? What do you think is the potential?

Without AI I could never create a Stelfie and the good part is that without my effort, my time, my skills the AI could never create such a complex structure (at least not yet).
I see the future will have many opportunities coming from this very moment we are witnessing, it is important to leave a solid mark now. I want Stelfie to be the signature of this transition and I want to leave a proof of work that is fun, ironic but also has depth and philosophical meaning behind.

Do you think AI is killing art or just expanding the realm of what is possible?

I quote a sentence I have on Stelfie website to answer:
“Each Era has had its own debates, its own masters, its own shapes. 2022 has seen the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence) applied to Art. This has created different views in the various communities so Stelfie (and his creator) decided to approach the topic in a different way. We do not want to settle a winner for the use or not use of AI but we do want to prove that combining good Artist skills with good use of AI technology unfold a freshly new branch to add to the Art evolution progress.”

Finally, what is next for Stelfie? Where will he go next?
If I tell you then I would change your future, I cannot risk that. A much more serious answer would be that it would be very interesting to have a physical art exhibition gallery of Stelfie Adventure.
The future will tell us.