Angel Olsen + Anna Calvi = Annagel Olcalvisen

Crossbred Songbirds

If you know me at all, then you knew I wasn’t going to be able to resist making these: composite portrait sets of female musicians!

To be clear, the vast majority of the source faces used belong to artists with whose music I’ve a personal connection at some point in my life, so if you’re wondering why X or Y (I guess in this case, X or X) isn’t represented, it usually just means they and I never clicked (i.e., remotely communed via repeatedly played pre-recorded audio).

I started off the first set (arbitrarily limited to 10 images at a clip due to Instagram) using Midjourney’s /blend command to combine only 2 pictures together: one of each woman. But it quickly began to feel more difficult than it should have been to find consistent, high-quality pix of most of these ladies’ faces, so to compensate, I evolved my technique, which now uses 3 to 4 images of each woman and 2 generations of blending for a better final result. Which means that (sigh) yes, I am gradually going back and re-doing some of the weaker 2-image ones.

I’m going to limit that backtracking as best I can, and try to primarily keep moving forward though, cause there are still quite a few pairings to plow through before I can consider myself “done” with this particular effort. I mean, due to its very nature (and the idiosyncrasies of my own memory), it may never be fully complete, but there will definitely be a point soon enough when there will no longer be sets of 10 dropping at once. In any case, all the latest versions that I have published will always be added to the slideshow on this post, so come back and revisit for more imaginary winners of the virtual genetic lottery!

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