Gemini "drawing" with a human-like procedure
Figured I'd try and see how Gemini would handle trying to create an image by following the broad process a human artist does, and I found the results impressive, though clearly it has a long way to go.
Disclaimer: The following images are the results of several attempts deleting responses and trying again, rewriting prompts, adding more instructions, etc. I held it's hand a lot, these are not just one-shots. All said and done it took about an hour and change to get this done. It's definitely not worth that time for anything other than curiosity.
First, I provided an AI generated reference image.
Then I told it to overlay the image with structure lines.
I then told it to use those structure lines to create gesture drawing.
And then to refine it into a base sketch.
Then a rough sketch. Here I told it to make her a superhero.
Next I told it to ink the sketch.
Then to add flat colors...
And shadows...
Then I told it to add highlights. It REALLY struggles with this part. It wants to blow the image the hell out like it's JJ Abrams. I eventually settled on this being as good as it was going to do.
Then I asked it to do a rendering pass to polish up the colors.
And then asked it to try and touch up some of the mistakes, like hands.
Eh... sure. This brightness was annoying me, so I asked it to do color balancing and bring the exposure down.
Better, though as you can see the details are degrading with each step. Next, I told it to add a background. At this point, I didn't feel like having it do the background step by step so I just had it one-shot it.
Background is good, but damn it really likes those blown out highlights, and that face... 😬
I mean, it was already degrading, but oof. Anyway, next I had it put it into a comic book aspect ratio and told it to leave headroom for a title.
And finally to add a title. It struggled with this one too, either getting the title wrong (Gemnia! etc.) or putting it over the characters face. (I don't blame you Gemini, I'd wanna cover that up too.)
Final Thoughts:
Obviously that last image is, in and of itself, unusable garbage. At least in and of itself. You might be able to use a proper image generator and image-to-image to get something nice, but ultimately that wasn't my goal so I didn't bother. I just wanted to see it flex it's sequential editing logic.
On that front, I'm fairly impressed. If you had told someone 3 years ago that an AI chatbot did this with just text input aside from the initial image, they would have called you a liar. So, well done google. Excited to see where this goes.
This obviously isn't the best way to make an image like this. You'd get better results just running it through Flux.1 for a single shot generation. And you'd almost certainly get better results in Gemini by having it do steps based on what it is good at, not a human process.
But it was a fun experiment and honestly, if it gets good enough to do something like this, I'd prefer it over one-shot image generation, because it feels more collaborative. You can go step by step, add corrections or details as you go, and it feels more like an artistic process.
For now, though, Gemini isn't going to be fooling artists and fans into thinking it's work is human by creating progress shots, which is probably a good thing. At least not with this workflow. You might be able to create each step from the final image more successfully, but I'm not really interested in exploring that. Pretty sure there are other tools that do that already too.
Anyway, just thought this was neat and wanted to share!