Okay, so I spent some time today messing around with this idea: a red dress and blonde hair. Dunno why, just popped into my head. Sometimes you just gotta try things out, right?
Getting the Ball Rolling
Fired up my usual tools. Didn’t really have a super clear picture in mind, more like a vibe. You know, bold red, bright blonde. Thought it would be simple enough. First few tries? Not great. The red was sometimes too orange, sometimes weirdly dark, like wine-colored, not the punchy red I wanted.
And the hair… ugh. Getting that blonde shade right without it looking yellow or washed out was a pain. Sometimes it looked more like straw. Not the look I was going for, definitely not.
Tweaking and Trying Again
So, I started refining things. I kept thinking, maybe the lighting was the problem. Tried describing different light setups. ‘Golden hour light’, ‘studio light’, ‘soft daylight’. That helped a bit with the hair, made it look less flat. But the dress color was still tricky.
I must have tried like, a dozen variations on ‘red dress’.
- Bright red dress
- Scarlet dress
- Crimson dress
- Simple red dress
- Flowing red dress
Honestly, just throwing words at it hoping something would stick. It’s a bit like fishing sometimes. You cast your line and wait. Sometimes you get a boot, sometimes you get what you wanted.
Eventually, I landed on specifying the fabric too. Like, ‘silk red dress’ or ‘cotton red dress’. That seemed to ground the color a bit more, made it look more realistic, less like a blob of pure red paint. The combination of ‘flowing silk red dress’ started giving me something closer to what I had pictured.
Figuring Out the Details
The pose was another thing. Didn’t want anything too dramatic. Just something simple, natural. Tried ‘standing casually’, ‘looking away’, ‘slight smile’. Getting the hands right is always a nightmare, always has been. Still not perfect in what I ended up with, but better than some of the horrors I got earlier. Hands are just… difficult. Always have been, probably always will be.
The blonde hair needed more work too. I added things like ‘wavy blonde hair’, ‘honey blonde’, trying to get away from that cheap yellow look. ‘Soft waves’ seemed to work better than just ‘wavy’. It’s all about finding those little keywords that nudge things in the right direction.
Where I Landed
So after a bunch of tries, maybe an hour or so of fiddling, I got something I was okay with. It’s not a masterpiece, you know? It’s practice. The dress is a decent shade of red, definitely red, not orange or burgundy. The blonde hair has some life to it, not perfect, but it reads as blonde. The overall feel is kinda what I was aiming for initially.
It’s always a process. You start with an idea, you poke at it, you get frustrated, you try something else, and eventually, maybe, you get close. Good enough for today’s session, anyway. Learned a bit more about describing colors and light, I guess. That’s the point of practice, isn’t it? Just doing the thing.
