Illusory Beauty / Digital Fantasy

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Digital Fantasy

In conversation with Illusory Beauty.

In conversation with Illusory Beauty, the make-up and AI artist who transforms aliens into models, escaping in fantastic otherwordly scenarios.

When did you start working as an Artificial Intelligence artist? What is your background?

I’m a makeup artist, beauty content creator and global educator. I shoot, retouch & edit pretty much all my work. I just love creating beautiful visuals. I started playing around with AI in December, I got hooked up really quick and I basically haven’t stopped obsessing since then. My boyfriend got me into it and now he’s rolling his eyes at me haha, he created a monster.

You work as a make-up artist as well. I think your works try to push the boundaries of make-up as a mere embellishment, instead you manage to transform faces into ethereal beings. What inspires you it create?

I’ve always been interested in visual arts. Photography, paintings, videos, crafts, architectures.. anything that I find beautiful. So starting to play with AI as a creative tool just made sense for me. The technology blew my mind and being able to see your creative visions appear before your eyes is something very special. When I do makeup, I try to invent characters and imagine a story for them, this helps me get more artistic in my designs. So doing the same with AI was just a logical sequence.

In your Instagram bio you say: “Welcome to alien fashion week.” I think it’s brilliant! Why did you choose to represent aliens?

I don’t like to set myself limits when I work. I really don’t want to have to stay in a certain box, I wanna be able to let my imagination run free. So by representing “aliens”, for me it meant that I could create worlds that didn’t exist, that I had no creative restrictions whatsoever. That’s the fun part of it. Oh and also I could justify the fact that they sometimes have like 8 fingers haha.

I think that the fashion world recently tends to represent models with straight lines, very skinny, sunken faces, almost like your aliens. What’s your thought beyond these beauty standards?

We’ve seen a progress in representation in the fashion world in the last few years. We’re not totally there yet but it is much more diverse than it used to be. As for the AI, technology is very new and the truth is when you don’t specify to the artificial intelligence that you want a certain body type or a certain ethnicity, they tend to give us skinny white girl in the first place.

At the pace at which it is evolving, I am not worried that we will be able to represent all body types, genders and ethnicity much more easily in the very near future.

It seems you are recreating a world hidden under the depths of the sea. Is there a thought of imagining a digital world beyond us, another type of reality?

It really is an escape for me. I’ve been obsessed with Lord of the rings, Harry Potter, animes and anything fantasy since I was a little kid. When I sit in front of the TV or with a book, it’s to wander into other dimensions, to be able to dream of things that do not exist and can’t be in my reality, to log off from real life. So that’s just natural for me to create these fantastic otherworldly scenarios.

I think digital art has become more and more prominent in the last few years. Because of the uncountable possibilities of making, because our modern eye is totally influenced by digital media and tools that we use on a daily basis, because it’s more sustainable in a way. What is the motivation that drove you into being an AI artist?

I think, when you’re an artist, you don’t choose to become one, it just comes to you. You do it because you love it, because it makes you feel things. So I had no “motivation”, I was just having a blast. I thought it was so inspirational and fun so I decided to share these beautiful images to inspire other as well. The response has been great so far.

How do you create your work specifically? Are those pre-taken pictures? or do you create everything from scratch?

At the moment it’s pretty much all only text to image. I export the images on other retouching apps, I will change beauty details, light, makeup, colorization when needed etc. I just started mixing my “real work” photography into it, still doing tests. It’s very promising and exciting ! Can’t wait to discover all the possibilities this new technology will bring.