Artificial Darren
My Experiments in Midjourney A.I. Art Generation
Inconsistence is Futile
Greetings my cherished subscriber.
Well it wouldn’t be 2023 if I didn’t delve into the controversial yet impressive A.I. art technology. Four months ago, at the peak of the hype and headlines, I began attempting to recreate and adapt my landscape painting aesthetic in Midjourney A.I to see what I could yield.
I would like to share my findings with you.…
The technology can utilise photographic, 3D rendering, digital or physical painting and drawing assets. As I first discovered, this often enabled me to realise my concepts to fairly refined or realistic results, all within a matter of seconds. Move over Ridley Scott.
This ability obviously appeals to my artist brain, especially when results either came close to my vision or generated unexpected ones which was exciting to explore further. For a fair amount of time in January, I was sneaking in image generations whilst on my phone when possible.
It’s quite addictive as you can probably imagine. My results often didn’t quite achieve what I wanted, but they would give a hint of something I did want or was curious about. It can hook you in that way. However it soon became apparent to me that there is a whole new art to master if I wanted to continue successfully down this rabbit hole.
Promptly Prompting
I’m not going to bore you by deep diving into the world of prompting (I’m not sure if I could do so anyhow) but if you want to master A.I. art generation (depending on your goals), it’s likely you need to learn and understand prompting to get close to generating the outcomes you want.
Prompting is the text instruction you input into Midjourney or alternative A.I. art tools to create images. Each generation creates a grid of four images based on your prompt. You can create a further four variations from each image and also upscale any images along the way when you’re happy with it as final artwork.
There’s no problem with entering a simple description of what you want, it can work well, depending on what your goals are. For most, it becomes apparent that some basic prompt knowledge is needed, even if it’s for aspect ratio or any specific styles or lighting and so forth.
Midjourney uses Discord to prompt, the helpful thing is that there are forums about prompting and you can see other individuals prompts via their results to get a gauge on what can work well. YouTube has plenty of quick tutorials and explanations of this digital wizardry so there’s plenty of information out there.
Discoveries
Below are some of my more successful results. Increasingly I found myself using the Blend prompt mode in which I can upload an image or several that Midjourney can combine together. I used some landscape reference and sometimes photos of my landscape paintings to see what would happen. The results seem to bounce between slightly photographic or digital concept art.
Wild Cards
Here are some experimentations that went off direction but which I like anyway!
The Next Frontier
I like some of the atmospheric effects, compositions and landscape textures I generated, however I couldn’t quite get the suns to the right size, colour or generally behave the way I wanted.
Whereas I dabbled in digital image-making a year ago (which will be featured in a future newsletter) the immediacy of A.I. can, at the very least, handle the bulk of the work or even serve as art reference for physical paintings. There’s the option for me to edit, add to and refine the image digitally…which is what I think I’ll end up doing.
For now though, it’s back to focusing on oil painting and preparation for my upcoming solo exhibition! More details on this in my next newsletter.
Delivered!
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I’ll see you with my next delivery!
Thank you and all the best,
