Hybrid Species is my latest fine art project, continuing my exploration of digital flora through hyperrealistic flower creations. It's part of an ongoing fine art series that began in 2020 with Artificial Bloom, where 3D programs and natural patterns played a central role in the creative process.
Hybrid Species is my first artwork series utilizing AI in the creation process to push the boundaries of digital botanical artistry, featuring 80 intricately crafted floral designs. Drawing inspiration from a wide variety of real-world species, flowers, fruits, and other botanical elements are blended into hyperrealistic hybrids that feel both familiar and otherworldly.
Flowers have always been at the core of this series, serving as the primary canvas. Each design reflects my curiosity about nature and the symbolic meanings of flowers across different cultures and throughout history. It's a multilayered connection that intertwines aesthetics, symbolism, emotion, and historical context.
Floral art has continuously evolved, adapting to the shifting styles and tastes of each era. With the rise of AI tools, my workflow and creative process have also transformed—becoming an ongoing evolution rather than a one-time exchange. Like nature, the process sometimes veers off in unexpected directions, feeling random at times, while at others, it follows a clear path, uncovering new possibilities. This intersection between human imagination and machine-driven innovation fascinates me most in each flower design.
In this series, nature is portrayed not as it is, but as it could be—reimagined, reshaped, and rendered through algorithms. Hybrid Species presents a vision of flora from a parallel world, where nature is captured through a digital lens, without a mirror.
The Design Process—
The creation of the flower artworks was a highly exploratory process, blending traditional graphic design tools with experimental techniques. While not every flower followed exactly the same procedure, the overall process can be categorized into three main stages:
The creation of the flower artworks was a highly exploratory process, blending traditional graphic design tools with experimental techniques. While not every flower followed exactly the same procedure, the overall process can be categorized into three main stages:
Development: I began by designing rough flower compositions using a diverse image dataset. This dataset included images generated by my custom-trained flower AI model, along with CC0 photos, 3D-scanned data, 3D renders, and photographs from my personal flower archive. These rough compositions served as the foundation for the AI-powered hybrid creations.
Evolution: To create hybrid versions of my flower designs, I used AI tools to merge and blend various flower attributes, forming new, imaginary hybrid flower breeds. This was the most enjoyable stage, as the blending and merging processes led to a wide variety of unexpected outcomes. Engaging in a constant dialogue with the machine allowed me to guide certain aspects of the image while also letting go of control to some extent, resulting in outcomes I could have never imagined.
Refinement: The raw output of the hybrid flower designs underwent a detailed manual retouching process. This included correcting errors, enhancing details, upscaling, relighting the flowers, and replacing the background. By integrating the refined flowers into my "digital photo studio" within Cinema4D, I was able to give each design a cohesive and polished look, utilizing real-life lens characteristics such as bloom, glow, and grain, which gave the designs an ethereal and timeless quality.
Tools used:
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema4D, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Adobe Firefly.
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema4D, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Adobe Firefly.
Each artwork in this series will soon be available to acquire digitally. If you have any questions about the project, feel free to reach out to me at hanneshummel.art or on my socials: IG and X.
Thanks for your time ✌️