Manga Kink Molière moodboards

 A mood board is a useful design tool. When I was an undergraduate in the 1990s, we made these as collages using stacks of old magazines, scissors, & glue. Those became digital Photoshop collages, then Pinterest boards, then Canva collages. 

Basically you create a composite of imagery that evokes the mood you’re cultivating. This is not where you’re doing research—I remember a classmate made a great mood board that included photos of fried chicken, corn, and opulent pearl necklaces. Wish I could remember what show it was for. 

The Pinterest board linked in my post on color palette generation began as a mood board pinboard. As the conceptual discussions progressed, I weeded the images included on that board to create the final color palette board in its current incarnation. I found this process more efficient and streamlined than the old-school paste-up collage method, which was fun but difficult to revise without creating an all new board, nevermind the difficulty of sharing it with other creative team members, even living in the same town.

Mood board generation is something I keep coming across suggested as a “delegatable” project AI could do, which feels like a suggestion from someone who has no idea the purpose a mood board is supposed to serve (at least in this context), and who has never created one themself.

Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go. A mood board is specifically helpful with visualizing complex production concepts, like the “Bollywood Jane Austen” example mentioned in that color palette post. I decided I would try a similar kind of aesthetic mashup, “manga kink Molière.”

Copilot generated these mood boards for me:

They’re compelling, but are peppered with odd elements like grids and pies of what would be swatches of colors, prints, or textures.. 

Also, the content appears to all be AI-generated images, rather than pulled from actual manga, actual kink media, or any literal historical imagery like paintings from Molière‘s era, Or related visual references, like images of Commedia dell’Arte characters/masks.

The argument could be made that my prompt needs to be refined to include more specific information about what the mood board should contain, but honestly, I think I would just import these graphics into Canva, erase the superfluous elements, and paste anything I found aesthetically appealing into a mood board I created as a digital collage from other research images I would’ve had to track down as well.

On a related note, I would absolutely love to work on a show with this concept. I’ve been part of the team on several Molière plays & made some cool costumes for them, but generally found the source material out of touch and frivolous. If those comedic, patriarchical plots and stock characters were placed within the context of a kink scene, it would all make so much more sense.