CAMA Mystery Sampler Pin-Ups (Eva Quim's Big Beautiful Pin-Up Series 2 : SDXL2, #2)

These aren't photos. They really, really aren't.

So, to be perfectly clear, particularly to the folks at Amazon who keep classifying these books as erotic photography, (who block the books without reading this) none of these images are photographs. There are no individual human models involved in the making of these images.

None of these images reproduce copyrighted photographs or illustrations; no image search reveals a match for any of these images, because while I have used AI to assist in their creation, there are no raw AI images in this book.

I begin with a customized Stable Diffusion model, (SDXL2 based) a checkpoint merge of several models and my own artwork. I generate a thousand images at a whack on my own computer using open source Stable Diffusion software.

Then the hard part, which is curation, finding the good ones, the one out of a hundred worth working on longer.

This is half of what you are paying for.

The other half is the laborious Photoshop repainting and recoloring, (repainting oh so many hands!) compositing, correcting anatomy through judicious liquefaction and obsessive noodling, and a lot of adjustments, small and large. Puppet warp. Background replacement. In-painting with Adobe's image generation to remove stupid AI crap, repair eyes, fingernails, background elements.

I work on their expressions until the images come alive, spending a lot of time on the eyes. The raw AI images never work for me until I tweak them.

No copyrighted franchise characters, or living artist prompts were used in the making of these images.

They represent a collective effort, the prompts, (a tiny part really) the artists work in the models, and the curation design and montage and retouching on top of that.

At this point, I'm deep in the hole on this project. I've made almost nothing.

It's a labor of love, which I hope you share with me.

***

The CAMA Mystery Backstory

It starts in the mid-sixties at a Hollywood insider's party at Bohemian Grove. Four Great Men Gerry Anderson, Irwin Allen, Russ Meyer, and Roger Corman get into a heated argument with Gloria Steinem about exploitation films featuring female leads.

Were they empowering or objectifying?

The four men say empowering. Steinem says objectifying. Finally, frustrated by their refusal to grasp feminism, she storms off with Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty. The Great Men stay behind and talk all night. (They may or may not have dropped acid an experimental LSD isomer, not 25 but 69 courtesy of Timothy Leary.)

In a collective creative frenzy, they brainstorm loglines, show ideas, and pitches. But by morning, they abandon it all. Too risky, too weird, too hard to sell.

Why? Because every show starred women. The leads, the experts, the commanders. Men were assistants, secretaries, love interests. Pretty feminist, right?

But the women? They were all classic Russ Meyer beauties in outrageous sci-fi costumes. Just like Star Trek miniskirts, UFO's Moon Girls purple wigs and silver jumpsuits, and Diana Rigg's Avenger's cat suits. CAMA was going to be empowering and objectifying. Maybe one was the Trojan horse for the other. Who can say?

This introduction is continued inside the book. . . .