Applied the AI-assisted experiments to the latest book cover I made. When we discussed the concept with Tomasz, we came up with the idea of Dmitry's portrait as some sort of an oracle. Many of his books are now sold (if sold at all) in Russia wrapped in stretch film, so signs of censorship immediately came to mind.

I first generated some death masks as proof of concept to see that the current algorithm is fully capable of consistently producing well-lit material the way I need.

See, one the beautiful things about working with AI is that you get to effortlessly explore the endless latent image space for as long as you can afford to while refining your idea. Once I got the basic image style, I then crossed it with Dmitry's photo and generated new faces as source files for my manipulation.

I then combined the generated faces, drawing some parts and transforming and warping the others, to achieve a certain degree of portrait likeness. I tried my best to keep myself from making everything perfect as I knew well enough that the plastic texture and the film effects would change the final image.

Fun fact: the document fragments overlayed on top are real fragments from my great grandfather's case file. He was sent to a concentration camp for 8 years because of a fictional connection to Polska Organizacja Wojskowa.