SUSAN TIPPETT BRAITHWAITE

Breathe. After months of planning and recon, it’s finally time. Your mission is clear: get in, grab the intel, and get the fuck out—undetected. Breathe, you tell yourself again. The enemy’s lair is a labyrinthian maze of corridors and dead ends shrouded in darkness. But you welcome the lack of light as the shadows cling to you like a second skin. You are the darkness, an unseen and unheard whisper moving closer to your target.

Torch beams dance along the walls, stopping you in your tracks. This is a covert mission. No one can know you were ever here. You drop to the ground and peek around the next corner. Shit. He’s standing outside the door that your schematics identified as holding the intel.

Knocking the guard out will jeopardise this vital mission. Instead, you toss a pebble behind you, hitting it off the far wall. The man rushes by you to investigate. On your feet, you slip around the corner. The lock is no obstacle to your skills, and within moments, you have the intel you came for: this week’s Spies, Lies & Digital Skies prompt.

What is SLDS?: SLDS is a weekly prompt challenge that encourages artists of all levels, including non-artists, to create an image with a spy and romance theme. You can use various tools such as Photoshop, ArtRage, Procreate, DALL-E, MidJourney, Microsoft Edge’s CoPilot, or any other software that you prefer to create your artwork.

Last Week’s Highlights: A High-Tech Gadget’s First Use

Before we head out on this week’s mission, let’s check out last week’s superb entries for A High-Tech Gadget’s First Use. Guys, your images, as always, are insanely cool.

Check out some of my favourites!:

Gothic Chaos with Jez

Check out Jez’s post for more gothic chaos.

Gadgety Mishaps with Marie

Check out Marie’s post for more gadgety mishaps.

This Week’s Challenge:
Infiltrating an Enemy’s Lair

Laser beams, biometric locks, vicious attack dogs (or cats or chimps), armed guards, sentries, automatic turrets… oh, and volcanoes! Depending on who your enemy is, the possibilities are endless.

Create with Me

Last week was a lot of fun for me. There’s nothing better than a traditionally serious genre (spies) turned into a comedy. I’ve not decided if I’m going to do that with this prompt or not… but there is scope for it: getting caught, wearing dayglo, or knocking every pot and pan over in the kitchen of the enemy’s lair like a cat having a bad day.

Let’s Sneak into our Enemy’s Lair

Okay, after about two seconds of consideration, I’ve decided to go with the fun version.

PROMPT: Create a wide-format image of a female spy dressed in black tactical gear. The woman sneaks through the kitchen of the enemy’s lair but accidentally knocks everything over. She cringes, fearing that her accident-prone shenanigans have ruined her mission of infiltrating the lair. Luckily, the guard just outside doesn’t react because he’s so engrossed with his phone.

Let me start with how much I love the female and the carnage in this image. I do have a couple of niggles: the guard in the room ruins it, and then there’s the style of the kitchen. It doesn’t feel very evil lair, does it? When I think of an evil lair kitchen, I see an industrial kitchen. Let’s see if changing the setting will help get us closer.

PROMPT: Let’s change the perspective of the image. The guard is face-on to us, and through an open door, we can see the female and her calamity in the kitchen. The kitchen is a vast, industrial-looking one.

Eh, meh. This one isn’t doing it for me. I think the guard is going to be an issue.

PROMPT: Create a wide-format image of a female spy dressed in black tactical gear. The woman sneaks through the enemy’s lair’s vast, industrial kitchen but knocks absolutely everything over. Pots, pans, etc., crash and clang as they hit and skitter across the floor. She cringes, fearing that her accident-prone shenanigans have ruined her mission of infiltrating the lair.

It’s all there, but the scenes lack real cohesion to make them funny or even interesting.

Refining Calamity in the Enemy’s Lair

I love the first image I came up with, and I think that love has coloured my judgement of all the others. So, as I’m working with DALL-E, I can prompt it to manipulate my favourite image.

First up, let’s get rid of the guard. I used the highlighting tool to select the guard.

PROMPT: Remove him.

Better. Closer. Stronger.

PROMPT: Change the kitchen to a vast, industrial-looking one, please.

? Yes!!! This is perfect. The kitchen is awesome, her body language is spot on, and–big bonus–the phone is gone!

Over to You

Now, it’s time for you to step into the shadows and infiltrate the enemy’s lair. Let your creativity loose in the world of espionage by creating your masterpiece, and share your vision of this covert operation with us in the comments. (See the beginning of the post for “How to join in”).

Hit the follow button and join us next week to see where our creative journey takes us.

Till next time, stay awesome,

Susan x