If you haven’t seen it, here is the original post.

Esther is the best friend to my lead character in the Renaissance of Self series. Esther wears a costume in Part 1 – The Escape as she competes in one the central events of the novels: the Historical Sewing Society’s Renaissance and Age of Discovery Pageant. Her entry recreates an actual historical painting called Ritratto Di Donna Ebrea Con Gli Attributi Di Joele or Portrait of a Jewish Woman with Tools.

I ended my last post with what has become final ver. 1:

This image helped me write what she looked like in her gown very well. But I’ve been creating A LOT of images for Renaissance of Self (hereafter referenced as ROF) and one thing became very clear. As I stress her Jewish heritage to the AI art engines, she has dark brown hair. She should. Unless I’m specifying that she colors or treats her hair in some way, dark brown hair is genetically the default for someone of Jewish heritage.

So this image had to go back to the drawing board. By which I mean a mix of my favorite AI art engine Leonardo.ai, my own skills using Paint.net, and occasionally some Nightcafe for adding a different ‘thought process’ to the images.

First, I just asked the AI to generate me a Jewish girl named Esther in historical costume to get a better face.

For the most part, I got one face shape, a very different one from final v.1. So the next step was to frankenstein this face on to the existing photo and run it through. I got a pretty good result.

Unfortunately this was still too much of a painting and not a photograph of a modern person. so the refining continued!

The left featured image was the right two images recombined with my exiting images and the original to keep the beaded under cap. Plotwise, this beaded cap is absolutely why she wins the costume construction portion of the event. It remaining intact throughout the iterations is critical. Now we have a good working piece so I added back in the double strand black beaded necklace.

Things got muddled for awhile, but we get to final v.2

It took maybe two weeks for me to decide to go back in and keep tweaking.

This time around I really wanted to get her skin tone more correct. Esther shouldn’t be as pale of skin as me, someone with German-Ukrainian heritage. From there we have final v.3.

This one was close but had probably swung too dark for a Jewish American girl who grew up in Philadelphia, even if she lives in the Phoenix, AZ area now. Her parents are more likely from a population to emigrated from Europe. It was also not as crisp as my inner perfectionist demands.

So with some clean up and photo tools like brightening we get to final v4 in my branded image format.

Hope that journey was fun to see!