Don’t Give Up - CNY 2024
2024 is the Year of the Dragon. I was born in the Year of Dragon (1976), so this year is my year. 2024 is the Wood Dragon. 1976 was the Fire Dragon. So I created these images as Fire Dragons. These illustrations function both as a Chinese New Year card as well as a self portrait — with the fire dragon metaphor.
龍 The Chinese Dragon (loong, long or lung) is a legendary creature in Chinese mythology. As the only mythological creature in the Chinese Zodiac, they traditionally symbolize potent and auspicious powers, particularly control over water — i.e. prosperity and flow.
May the dragon enrich your year with lots of joy and prosperity!
Poem
龍舞霜林燃火紅
年歲豐盈喜自隆
The dragon dances in frosty woods, igniting a blaze of red,
As the years bring abundance, joy naturally ascends.
This poem is a play on the Chinese New Year greeting. It’s structurally formed by 7 characters in two lines.
This poetic form is called 七言絕句, which translates to “seven-character quatrain.” This form is a classical Chinese poetic form consisting of a quatrain with seven characters (or syllables) per line. It was particularly popular during the Tang Dynasty. The Tang Dynasty is often considered the golden age of Chinese culture — it’s ruled by the Lee Family 李, which is my family name — whether I’m related to the ruling family is a different story. (LOL)
There are aspects about this poem that I intended:
- 龍 Dragon. First character of the first line.
- 年 Year. First character of the second line.
- 龍年 Year of the dragon. The first characters of the two lines combined form the purpose of the greeting.
- 林 Forest. Made up by two characters 木 (wood). 2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon.
- 火 Fire. Represents the Fire in the Fire Dragon, the year I was born.
Tech
I made these compositions using Stable Diffusion. I exported a custom designed typography as a PNG to drive a Canny control net. I additionally used an abstract image I made with Midjourney to drive the style using the Clip Vision IP Adapter control net. Then I overlaid my original design on top of the generated images.
Images
Technical Parameters
Prompt
anime artwork chinese dragon, flames, ribbon, fire, red scales, gold leaf, smoke, dark background, imaginative, energy, bokeh, light particles, black ink, abstract expressionist paint splatter, dust, chinese new year . anime style, key visual, vibrant, studio anime, highly detailed
Neg Prompt
photo, deformed, black and white, realism, disfigured, low contrast, people, human, ugly, error, deformed
Parameters
Stable Diffusion txt2img
- Steps: 16
- Sampler: Euler a
- CFG scale: 3
- Seed: 2397636229
- Face restoration: CodeFormer
- Size: 1024x1024
- Model hash: abd3db6820
- Model: vibrantHorizonTurbo_v20
- VAE hash: 235745af8d
- VAE: sdxl_vae.safetensors
- ControlNet 0:
- Module: invert (from white bg & black line)
- Model: diffusers_xl_canny_full
[2b69fca4] - Weight: 1
- Resize Mode: Crop and Resize
- Low Vram: False
- Processor Res: 512
- Guidance Start: 0
- Guidance End: 1
- Pixel Perfect: True
- Control Mode: My prompt is more important
- Hr Option: Both
- Save Detected Map: True
- ControlNet 1:
- Module: ip-adapter_clip_sdxl
- Model: ip-adapter_xl
[4209e9f7] - Weight: 0.5
- Resize Mode: Crop and Resize
- Low Vram: False
- Processor Res: 1024
- Guidance Start: 0
- Guidance End: 0.5
- Pixel Perfect: False
- Control Mode: ControlNet is more important
- Hr Option: Both
- Save Detected Map: True
- Automatic1111 Version: v1.6.1