She stands unwavering, an unmovable force amidst the swirling maelstrom. Ever-changing hues dance around her, a symphony of vibrance. A second visage can be seen near her peeking through the colorful haze, not quite ready to face the world with the same confidence she exudes. One wonders if this scene is a dream or reality, searching for meaning within the chaos. Her tranquil composure speaks a cryptic truth: there is beauty in embracing the unknown and in finding serenity amidst life's vibrant uncertainties.

This piece is a 1/1 edition by Maneki Neko and her first animated piece. It has roots in separate pieces of work created with Disco Diffusion, Stable Diffusion and the permutation of thousands of combinations of prompts, settings and models over the course of a year. It was created by combining two of Maneki's previous art pieces into new derivatives using the Blend tool in Midjourney with the intent to depict a woman in a colorful, psychedelic dreamscape. The best of these blends were curated and used as initialization images in Stable Diffusion in experimentation with an evolving prompt, settings, models and ControlNet to determine the best rendering for these particular images. A series of 8 images were generated with different seeds to produce slightly different results in the colorful clouds. Each image was edited in Photoshop for fine detail and color edits and a single woman's face selected to be present in each version. Then these images were combined into an interpolated video on RunwayML, and trimmed and edited in AfterEffects.

MP4 video, 1280x1280 px, 15 seconds Year Minted: 2023