Meet Stelfie, A Mysterious Time Traveler Who Captured 28 Hilarious Selfies With Historical Figures

We wanted to learn more about Stelfie and his journeys so we got in touch with his creator. He shared that Stelfie started to be developed in October and the official date of his first appearance is the 6th of December, 2022. The artist did not have a precise timeline of places he wanted Stelfie to visit. "I spend some time writing down ideas with the message that I want the scene to deliver and I build a story on that."

"Stelfie is my alter ego, I'm 41 with black hair and a black beard so I thought it was fun to have him bald and shaved."

We got curious about how the scenes were created. The artist shared that the first step is to write down ideas. "I do that because I want to have a story that the viewer can perceive by looking at the final artwork. Details are very important to create a credible scenario and I feel the magic of Stelfie is due to the imagination of the viewer who can wonder about what happened the moment before or after the specific Stelfie was taken."

"Step 2 is drawing a sketch of the scene. I use Procreate (which is a drawing app) and, very roughly, I draw a sketch of how the overall scene should look, adding the characters that I want in the scene, the background, the extra elements that need to be present, some info about lighting (indoor/outdoor - day/night) and so on.

I do that because I feel it is important to be consistent with the initial idea I had and having a sketch is forcing me to be faithful to that and to have control over Stable Diffusion as opposed to having Stable Diffusion drive me where it wants to go."

"Step 3 Is to start a draft version with Stable Diffusion. A very basic scene where lighting, focus, exposure are not important at all. What's important is to get a basic version of the scene with the characters in.

Step 4 is to modify that manually in Photoshop or Procreate. So with a brush tool, I paint over the image to give the characters the pose I want them to have, I add elements (very roughly), I cut/split/paste/warp and so on and then I feed the result back to Stable Diffusion to reharmonize the output."

"Then I start with the most difficult elements (faces/hair/beard/animals) and I make sure to have them done almost perfectly. Then I manually work the lighting and the saturation, making sure that the scene is coherent and harmonic. Finally, I work on the hands of the characters (if there are hands/feet in the scene) and manually add motion/tilt blur in Photoshop. This is important to create a credible scene, not a simple static shot."

The creator of Stelfie shared that he has been an artist for almost 2 decades. "At first, a 'traditional' canvas artist which mainly was a passion but in the last 5 years I transitioned to digital art and I made a living out of it. I haven't yet disclosed my identity. Although I'm not that popular, I'm sure some people would know my artist name. I probably will do it in the near future, but I do not commit to that yet."

"I'm very grateful the stories I'm trying to tell are getting so much attention. Stelfie is an easy character to be aligned with, I was expecting to have some attention especially because AI is such a hot topic but I was not considering the power that social media has," the artist shared.

Of all the characters that Stelfie visited, we wanted to know if there was someone the artist would want to meet. He shared that every character Stelfie met has its own appeal and its own story. "Stelfie got a hand-signed portrait made by Picasso and it was very cool, he did teach Einstein the tongue pose that became so popular 10 years later, and he met Lincoln and showed him the mount where his face will be carved in the future. Each story is different. Stelfie changed so many things in the past and by doing that, the adventures he is traveling to are, paradoxically, the reason our present looks like it is right now."