It starts with a selfie. This particular selfie is part of a photo shoot to try and get good photos for my side project: Adara Rochelle Lionheart; basically a place to post my pagan practice without it being in my very Christian family’s face. (Think ‘you can’t get mad at me because you came searching this part of me out… I never advertised it. I don’t want to debate it, I’ve done all the thinking I need to do on my own.’) This selfie was taken in September 2021.

The next set of images are a collection of ai generated images of “Scarlet Witch: Feminine Beauty and Power” using the selfie as the inspiration on the strong inspiration setting in the Wombo Dream App. (For all those who will later ask me how ai art app I use. )

This next piece is a collage of the progressing the AI image towards looking like a person again by layering altering the opacity then using photo editing program alterations using hues, tints, filters and more to pronounce desired lines. I went back and forth between two different apps (Photo Layers and Fotor) making the progressive iterations The later images are the product of actively trying to transform the image from realistic into a digital painting as I realized this was a kind of self-portrait, just done without any brush strokes or manual enhancements.

This next image is a side by side of original selfie and my digital self-portrait done completely on my phone using the plurality of apps: Wombo Dream, Photo Layers, and Fotor. This is where I thought I was going to leave it until I remembered that my phone has a stylus. I downloaded a vector drawing program called and kept going trying to now make an actual digital painting by sculpting areas the way I would if making a real life painting. I took the drawn images back over into Photo Layers and blended it with previous iterations back and forth. The last three images in the collage are filters on what I’ll call the semi-final painting, center-left.

The next collage is entirely filters applied to the semi-final image. My intent in making so many was to layer them back together to create the final image.

Finally, I did do that blending and here are the results with the bottom row being calls back to the previous versions to track our progress.

Since it find the comparisons between the phases to be super fascinating, here’s a very clean comparison of the selfie, the ai art, the impressionistic self- portrait, and the digital painting self-portrait.

For a closer look at the MANY iterations that I created in this project, here’s a gallery. Thanks you for interest!! Feel free to check out my various projects including any witchy/ pagan fun on Adara’s FB and IG or review my other digital art projects on Tara Lionheart (The TaLi project): FB, IG, Deviant Art, Redbubble, TeePublic, and here on WordPress. You can also support my art by checking out Millennial Magick LLC, the grown-copper jewelry, crystal art, and mystic supplies company. We sell at pop-up handmade marketplaces and at renaissance festivals.