I got multiple nice comments about the cover art for Closing Our Eyes And Pretending It Makes Infinity Go Away. But those gorgeous but weird eyes and koi-like rainbow swirls were AI generated.
Here’s the new version:
Something possessed me to check Pexels for “compound eyes” rather than a human eye, and this first result, by “Sai Pixels”, was geodesically fascinating. (I did try a couple of human eyes later, but preferred this. It’s particularly ironic that insects can’t close their eyes…)
I painted bright colors over the original color swirl layer, blurred and glitched it and so on, and twisted it… and it started to hint at the curves of an infinity symbol, so I thanked my muse and took it in that direction. I kept the space photo layer (already masked out in the center) and text layers from the original.
The big version is at https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a4030625194_10.jpg.
For these updates, in MusicBee I just edited the existing album to point to the new artwork. But this didn’t work well when I copied it to my phone’s music library, since the original artwork was still embedded. No problem, I updated in that app (Musicolet) as well. …and then on the next sync those changes were overwritten and it was back to the old art. One wonders why there’s a cover.jpg if the images are also embedded directly in the mp3?
As it turned out, the simplest fix turned out to be downloading the albums with new art from Bandcamp again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯