#leah's artbreeder narnia project 2k22

[queenlucythevaliant]

The Pevensie Siblings

High King over all the rest

The tender-hearted big sister

The traitor who mended

And a dear, darling heart-daughter of Aslan

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Castles in The Chronicles of Narnia

Cair Paravel on its little hill by the sea

Anvard, sheltered from the mountain wind 

The Witch’s House between the two hills

Harfang, home of the Gentle Giants

The Palace of Charn, wonder of the world, perhaps all worlds

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The most unfortunate boy

The girl as true as steel

+ Bonus: their son, the most famous king to ever rule Archenland

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The cabby who knew Aslan

The housewife who became queen

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Villians

The so-called Queen of Narnia

The serpent-lady by the fountain

Rabadash with two hundred horse

The last man in the world to have a real fairy godmother

The Claudius to Caspian’s Hamlet (and not much else, really) 

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The Caspian family tragedy:

The boy who believed in fairytales

His radiant, beloved wife

The disenchanted prince

Their dear friend and captain

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The king’s man: a voyager and a quester

Dying of thirst; faithful unto death

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The magician’s nephew no longer

The girl next door who’s game for anything he is

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The Last Battle

The king who stood firm in the last hour

The Calormene who braved the stable door

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Lucy’s fireflower cordial

A little diamond bottle filled with precious amber liquid, a few drops of which will heal any injury

[queenlucythevaliant]

So I’ve finished (I think) a project I’ve been working on for a number of months on and off. I discovered Art Breeder on Tumblr towards the beginning of last summer, and pretty much immediately fell in love with it. The really cool thing it allowed me to do was to basically externalize the mental pictures of characters that live in my head. I’d start blending together a few pictures that looked sort of close and keep on going until I got to a face that made me say, “ahhh, there you are.”

I’ve gone through and created faces for all the major human characters in Narnia, some in multiple stages of life. I’ve arranged them into very simple edits and will be posting them over the next several days. However, I found myself wanting to post a kind of artist’s statement along with them (for lack of a better phrase--I’m hardly an artist) :

I’ve lived with these characters in my mind’s eye since I was very small. It was such an odd, unexpected joy to see their faces looking at me from my computer screen-- not the people cast to play them in movies, but them, these characters, as they exist in my head. Like meeting old friends. 

If you feel so inclined, please feel free to comment on my posts and tell me how they compare to your mental images :)

[queenlucythevaliant]

How did you create the faces for your narnia picture things?

Artbreeder! It's a machine learning neural net that combines features from images of faces (and other things, although I haven't messed around with those at all) to create composites. You can also slide various "genes" such as age, race, expression (happy/angry), hair/eye color, and whatnot in positive and negative directions. Basically, I've gone through and picked out faces that looked sort of how I imagined the character I wanted to depict, created a composite, and then refined from there until I had something that looked right to me :)

I'm really pleased that others seem to enjoy this little project of mine! I had a lot of fun with it.

[queenlucythevaliant]

This is about how I visualize Cair Paravel on its little hill by the sea:

And then at sunrise the stone goes all golden like this for a few minutes:

If you've ever seen sunset over the Badlands or the Grand Canyon, I imagine it like that.

The Sunrise Castle

Cair Paravel is built in white stone, cut and polished so that it catches the light. When the sun is high, the castle glitters on the seashore like a gem. It can be seen from a great distance, from the hills and ridges of the surrounding country. Most days, the castle can be seen from Galma. On a clear day, a sharp-eyed man can make it out from the shores of Terebinthia. Eagles and Hawks and other birds of prey use the Cair to navigate; among Birds, it is called the East Beacon.

Yet it is at sunrise that Cair Paravel is the loveliest; anyone who has ever seen it will tell you so. At sunrise, the fires of dawn dance across the white stone and the castle itself glows pink and orange and gold, gold like an otherworldly ember. Standing on the beach, with the sunrise at your front and the Cair at your back, one can almost feel engulfed by light—so Edmund and Caspian and Lucy thought, at least until they saw the Last Sea.

Cair Paravel is also a castle of windows. Large windows; wide panes of uninterrupted glass created by dwarvish and mermish craftsmen who together excel at such things. The most desirable bedrooms face east; in them, one can throw open the curtains and gaze out at the sea from one’s own bed. Yet every living space in the castle has a view. The windows let the light in; there is scarcely any need for lamps in the Cair until evening falls.

It is not a large castle; certainly nothing like the Tisroc’s palace, nor even as large as Anvard. It is a castle built to awe its guests rather to intimidate them. It is built for beauty, not for power. Its rooms are comfortable and its hallways easy to navigate. Yet from within and without, it is a castle of light. As King Cor of Archenland once remarked, the Cair never lets you forget whose it is. A castle of light, standing on the easternmost shore of Narnia, which once a day glows gold with the sunrise: Cair Paravel belongs to Aslan.

Twice in its history, Cair Paravel was abandoned and left to molder. Both times, the shine went out of its stones. The white was covered in years and layers of dirt and neglect. The four kings and queens, sitting in its ruins, could not tell its stones from any others. Yet the light still shone through the empty places where great panes of glass, now broken, had once sat. From Stone Table hill, the castle still shone on the seashore. Peter could see it, when he stood at Aslan’s side.

[queenlucythevaliant]

My tags:

narnia: Anything involving The Chronicles of Narnia

     Book tags:

     reading fairy tales again: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

     aslan you’re bigger: Prince Caspian

     into light: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

     night under narnia: The Silver Chair

     narnia and the north! hurrah!: The Horse and His Boy

     founded in song: The Magician’s Nephew

     chapter one: The Last Battle

     Character tags:

     high king over all the rest: Peter Pevensie

     tender hearted big sis: Susan Pevensie

     the traitor who mended: Edmund Pevensie

     dear darling heart-daughter of aslan: Lucy Pevensie

     the king’s man: Eustace Scrubb

     dying of thirst: Jill Pole

     the most unfortunate boy: Shasta/Cor

     true as steel: Aravis 

     the magician’s nephew no longer: Digory Kirke

     game if you are: Polly Plummer

     Other:

     long and happy was their reign: Golden Age

     once there were four children: The four Pevensies together

     a narnian look about them: The Friends of Narnia as a unit

     the narnian air: Things that remind me of Narnia’s world

     no such thing as starch or flannel or elastic: clothes that look Narnian    

     jack: C.S. Lewis himself

     leah’s artbreeder narnia project 2k22: project I did depicting Narnia characters using Artbreeder 

     till we have faces: What it says on the tin

tolkien legendarium: The works of J.R.R. Tolkien

     there and back again: The Hobbit

     i will not say the day is done: The Lord of the Rings 

     aurë entuluva!: The Silmarillion

     in our madness: The Fëanorians

     the sundering doom: The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth

     tollers: J.R.R. Tolkien himself

     leah’s silm artbreeder project 2k22: Project I did depicting First Age characters using Arbreeder, ultimately culminating in the lineage of Elrond

only Thou art holy: Catch all for matters of Christian faith

     bible humans: the real people of Scripture

     theodicy: the problem of suffering

     the unquenchable fire: Christian history. Protestantism. Generations of the faithful. More of a vibe than anything else.

     sunday school kid: Christian culture

     Jesus laughed: Christian humor

     glory to God in the highest: angels that evoke God’s glory

     all truth is God’s truth: Intersection of science and faith

literature makes us more human: literature, books, reading, esp. the classics

     a beautiful wild creature with its leg in a trap gnawing it off to be free: tragedy and its importance

     to tote the weary load: Gone with the Wind

     unquiet souls: the Bronte sisters

     russia where are you flying to?: Russian lit, culture, etc. 

     the sparrow: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

     it’s hard to be the bard: Shakespeare

     leah in attolia: reading the Queen’s Thief series

     intertextuality: What it says on the tin

     a stranger comes to town: Catch-all for storytelling, fairytales, and myth

Beautiful things:

     image-bearers: Humans at their best, doing what we were made to do

     how can i keep from singing: music

     took up God’s house to meet him: churches, cathedrals, and cathedral-builders

     the light! the light!: beautiful light

     to touch the face of God: space, space travel, airplanes, often with a spiritual component

     no one will ever walk the earth so close to you: my sister, siblings in general

     be strong and courageous: be brave

     america is great because america is good: America at its best

Other miscellanea: 

endless forms most beautiful: Science and the natural world, especially biology

     dinosaurs make me happy: all sorts of awesome dino buddies

fossils! dun dun dun: fossils more generally

     in my soul i’m a lady knight: girls with swords 

     i enjoy being a girl: femininity and womanhood

     unto us a child is born: All things Christmas!

     He is risen yippee!: All things Easter

     bear flag republic: California 

     chronic illness is hilarious: all things chronic-illness related, funny and dark and both and so forth

     inklings challenge 2k22: posts related to my involvement in the 2022 Inklings Challenge 

     tay tay: Taylor Swift music

     leah learns calligraphy: My calligraphy work

Organizational: 

     pontifications and creations: Original posts

          Leah stories: My prose writing

          Leah poetry: My poetry

          Leah edits: Edits I’ve made

     ask me hard questions: Asks, tag games, and similar