The Virgil McDane Instagram

So, I have an Instagram now. And a linktree.

I didn’t expect this, but Paul Tassi at Forbes had a post in which he put up some great Destiny art. Only it wasn’t, actually, Destiny art. He had gone to a Discord bot called MidJourney. I don’t know how this thing works, but you can feed it art prompts and it will spit out images on the back end.

I have always been a visual person. Fantasy art, especially concept are or the illustrated covers we used to see on fantasy novels, has always been my thing.

So, yeah, I lost several hours last night producing some of these images. To be absolutely clear, I had no hand in making these. I put words in a chat field and things came out the other end. A LOT of things. Many of them horrible. But these were pretty cool (I thought).

urban fantasy illustrated book cover, modern sorcerer in trenchcoat wtih fedora walking down alleyway, mist billowing around his legs, holding a wand, eyes glowing, unreal engine
Virgil McDane as I live and breathe
illustrated fantasy landscape, column of multicolored light, shattered sky, lightning, monsters, a figure in a trenchcoat looks out over it all
The Arcus (aka the Rainbow)
mountain temple, massive doors, mercury, silver mist spilling from the doors
The Auftraug

They’re not perfect, but for the first time in my authorial career, I’m getting to share some visualization of the things I’ve seen for the past decade. I’m a sucker for stuff like this and I’m going to keep churning out things as they come to me, at least as long as I have things I want to see.

The software definitely has its limitations. I tried to make BlackThorn. That…could have gone better. I tried making Valinor as well and the thing it produced was something from a horror film.

In the meantime, anything I think is a good representation of the things in my stories will be on this Instagram page. Would love to hear feedback.

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