21/08/25

Paradise Lost,
Book 1


extracts used to influence
positive prompts

“Here Satan … after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him who next in Order and Dignity lay by him; they confer of thir miserable fall.” [The Argument]

Read: Paradise Lost: Book 1

workflow checkpoint: flux1-dev-fp8.safetensors
LoRA: flux-lora-collection / realism_lora_comfy_converted.safetensors


ComfyUI_00237

Black-and-white high contrast photograph: realistic closeup of monumental person made of cracking glass, realistic left and right hands and arms and head only, lying face down towards viewer, speaking with authority at viewer to the left, realistic fingers grasp rocks, high waves surround the rocks depicting a stormy scene with dark cloudy sky, dramatic minimal lighting in sky, austere, evoking change, chaos, highly detailed.

ComfyUI_00307

Black-and-white high contrast photograph: realistic closeup of monumental human made of cracking glass, realistic left and right hands and arms and head only, lying face down towards viewer, speaking with authority at viewer to the left, realistic fingers grasp rocks, high waves surround the rocks depicting a stormy scene with dark cloudy sky, dramatic minimal lighting in sky, austere, evoking change, chaos, highly detailed.

Ilia’s Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) model trained on a dataset of 77 photographs


ParadiseUnseen_00008

prdlst, Black-and-white high contrast photograph: realistic closeup of monumental people made of cracking glass, realistic left and right hands and arms and head only, lying face down towards viewer, speaking with authority at viewer to the left, realistic fingers grasp rocks, high waves surround the rocks depicting a stormy scene with dark cloudy sky, dramatic minimal lighting in sky, austere, evoking change, chaos, highly detailed.

ParadiseUnseen_00001

prdlst, Black-and-white high contrast photograph: realistic closeup of monumental human made of cracking glass, realistic left and right hands and arms and head only, lying face down towards viewer, speaking with authority at viewer to the left, realistic fingers grasp rocks, high waves surround the rocks depicting a stormy scene with dark cloudy sky, dramatic minimal lighting in sky, austere, evoking change, chaos, highly detailed.

summary


This selection marks my first attempts at generating images inspired by Paradise Lost. With Ilia’s help, I learned to use RunComfy (ComfyUI Cloud), applying my photography skills to frame compositions — using “closeup” as I would when photographing with shortsighted vision.

The first two columns show how replacing “person” with “human” added detail to the fingers (ComfyUI_00307). The description “cracking glass” aimed to challenge the polished appearance typical of AI-generated images, which often lack diversity and perpetuate stereotypes of minority groups, age, and gender.

Using Ilia’s model trained on my small photo library, the shift from “people” to “human” again significantly affected the results. I avoided negative prompts and fixed the seed at 0 to ensure consistent outputs — important given my fragmented vision. The prdlst tag linked the image generation to Paradise Lost.

Milton’s blindness while writing Paradise Lost resonated with my own sensory experience. This informed my exploration of the antihero, disobedience, and chaos, with Satan’s androgyny particularly evident in the Paradise Unseen series.

My library, curated to reflect diversity in age, gender, and body and hair types, produced more nuanced results than earlier tests — encouraging further work with a larger, more representative dataset.


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An Access to Work grant from Department of Work and Pensions supported the design of this webpage.

© Karren Visser. Paradise Unseen, funded by Immersive Arts UK, 2025.