Making of "Camellya sitting on a red balloon"

First I got an idea for the art and made a pose sketch Then I fed the image to AI and was trying to get something out of it:

Then I thought that perhaps vertical frame is more suitable for this and started generating as such. And it for some reason wasn't going too well

Not sure why, but it wasn't following the reference image too well.

But either way regardless the AI wants to do my thing or not, there's a sure way to make it. And so I took the most fitting image, tweaked the pose to my liking and fed it to img2img

And this is what I got:

The next thing was to add the balloon of course. So I did and fed it into AI again

Then it was a process of tweaking the prompt and rerolling until I get the balloon prettier. Although it was barely changing anything but a few highlights here and there (perhaps not without my assistance). The AI just doesn't know how to paint balloons well

Well, This is as far as it can get I guess. Which means that painting a good looking balloon was up to me again.

So it was time to make the AI to get as much as possible right features of Camellya. And as well as to reroll some misc scuff stuff.

There's one funny thing about AI, usually it's trained using straight-on images of a character. And when you want it to paint a character from the back, the AI is unaware it has to flip all of the features. So the solution? Of course, it's to flip the image myself and then unflip it back when the AI is done. So here go my attempts to make proper one leg pantyhose on the correct leg, as well as painting her arm wrap:

Ah yes, somewhere along the lines I decided to put her hand to her mouth as it looked cute. Also I added two cloth pieces on her back and was forcing the AI to paint them properly. Though the AI was unaware they existed and still was trying to paint the frontal view. Also somewhere the AI decided to add another balloon up there and I decided to keep it. There were some mid-process images, but they are gone.

In any case the AI made it clear it doesn't know how to paint her back, and again it was up to me to draw all of the correct details.

So there was some wrestling with AI for adding golden pieces, adding her armlet and so on, Also it was unaware she had a flower pattern on her pantyhoose, and I painted it myself

After so much struggling and painting I ended up with this:

Now I need to make the balloons transparent. I started to employ a new strategy. I ask the AI to remove the balloons and later I use the generated background parts to blend with the balloon. So I got this

Well, good enough. I can edit it.

Here's the combined result:

Ah yes, I also decided to throw in some petals.

But I did a mistake. I should have made the transparent balloon after I upscale the image, as the AI messing it up in the end:

Cool, now I have to make it opaque again and then blend with the BG one more time.

And then I also needed to remake her face, as it usually suffers from upscaling. Here are some other face variants:

Now I think there are eyes that look prettier than what I've chosen. Oh well. Also it was making her pupils too saturated red for some reason.

Ah yes, I also fixed her hand on the balloon.

And added blurred foreground petals.

So here you have it: