Album art for DJ Chopsteak’s Christmas Mixtape 2022. Stable Diffusion had been public for about four months when this started.
Concept
Christmas yard inflatables as the visual anchor. Oversized plastic Santas, light-up reindeer, suburban lawns competing for attention. The goal was to push that energy through Stable Diffusion and see what came back. What came back was Santas cruising lowriders through neon neighborhoods, towers of presents melting into surreal landscapes, and the distortions of early diffusion models making everything feel like a half-remembered holiday fever dream.
Process
The workflow moved between Stable Diffusion and Photoshop. Started with broad txt2img explorations to build a library of raw material. The best generations got refined with img2img passes at varying denoise strengths.
For the central float, multiple generations were composited in Photoshop, masked and layered to build the scene. The black-background isolation shots and silhouette masks in the gallery show that stage of the work.
The final cover was assembled in Photoshop with AI-generated elements, 3D renders, foil balloon type, and grunge textures. Somewhere between bootleg DVD cover and department store Christmas display.
