Coloring book rejects

What is it and where did the idea come from?

Just after I managed to jump through all the hoops of tax forms and other boring crap that I needed to do to start publishing books on Amazon, I needed to take some time and decompress.

My way of decompressing is to noodle around with stuff and ask myself “what if this thing was used completely differently from what it was intended?”

So Midjourney had just been released and I wanted to see if I could use it to mass produce coloring books for me (because I still thought that making money was the thing that made it valuable, not the act of actually making the thing).

And since I was hot off the release of Super Ugly Animals, I thought.. “why not ask it to generate some ugly animals for me?”. And since cats are the go-to animal when you do stupid things on the interne, I asked it to create “ugly cat, kids coloring pages, black and white”.

…or something in the lines of that.

The result was marvellous, but there was a lot of “noice” around the images, so I needed to reach for my best friend in the world; my iPad pro with Procreate.

I imported the images there and cleaned them up.

.. but that isn’t really enough. For it to be interesting for me to continue it, I needed to wrap it into a story. A story with some emotional hook.

So I imagined these ugly cats going to an audition to be in a coloring book about cute cats.

High hopes and a spring in their step.

And since the ugly cats were all told that they were cute by their parents (don’t we all love our children?), why shouldn't they have their hopes up?!?

But then the harsh reality hit them and they realize they don’t quite cut it and get rejected. Here we have an inflection point. Some tension and emotion.

So I took it on me to become the hero of the story!
I would give them their stage!
I would show those stupid cute cats audition people that anyone can get into a book!

.. and that’s the story that I was playing out in my head.

And.. here they are!

Why did I spend time on this?

I felt like I’d managed to successfully “misuse” Midjourney and turn it into something silly.

I felt especially proud to do it because at the time all the "AI Bros" on Twitter were showing all the cool things people could do with Midjourney. Posting things with words like "you won't believe what this prompt can give you in Midjourney_ 🧵"

I hate that kind of baiting! Mostly because I fall for it so easily.

Did I learn anything from this?

I suree did! Since the images were very low-res I couldn’t really use them in a print book. They would be all horribly pixelated.

So I tried different conversion sites that convert a png to svg.

Convert.io is the best one I could find that didn’t completely mangle the output.

Current status…

I have all the 12 images needed to create the book.

Now all I need to do is actually add them to my Amazon direct publishing template in Canva and put them “in context”.

I haven’t gotten around to doing it because I didn’t find the images that described the context well enough. But maybe I’ll just go without the context and release the book as it is. I can always update the book with a new version later!

Feel free to print them and start coloring them if you want to.

And do drop me a line when you’ve done it and send me your version!