MJC004 - Friend Prompts

The following is a miscellaneous collection of renders per the requests of friends. I often ask those around me to try their hand at creating artwork since MidJourney is such an uncomplicated and democratic software. This assembly may grow with more renders in the future. Since the prompts vary so wildly from one another, I should note that the example listed below is only for the top row of renders.

It is particularly interesting with MJC004 because the prompts tend to be short and straightforward given my friends’ often unfamiliarity with AI art techniques. This means that with less to work with, MidJourney falls into predictable trends of aesthetic, specifically existential and Romantic landscape art styles.

The only prompts of notable interest are the group of duck drawings in the second row, which are created from a parent image of my girlfriend’s pencil drawings. Though the style is still much more abstract than her work, it is strange to see MidJourney mirror her color blending and even emulate the glossy sheen of the paper being photographed.

Images created from June 2nd to November 21st, 2022 on MidJourney’s Discord Server.

Full Example Prompt: most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life --ar 2:4

MJC003 - Ana De Armas Portraits

MidJourney’s skill in rendering human faces has dramatically improved within the past year or so of its public release. However, at the time of these creations, it took a tremendous amount of learning, reiteration and proper phrasing to create human renders that were at all anatomically correct much less appealing to look at. This is to say that I am aware of the bizarre grotesqueness of Ana De Armas’s facial features and have gone so far as to publish them proudly for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, I should say that my initial desire to delve into AI was not its potential to replicate art in a traditionally acceptable manner, but specifically because of its abstract style. This mindset of mine has shifted as AI generators have rapidly become more advanced in their replication and subsequently lost that early charm of imperfection.

The second caveat worth noting is that this particular series set emulate the style of Ashley Wood, renowned for his chaotic painterly illustrations; his fragmented brushwork lent itself well to the fledgling creations of MidJourney. In July 6 of 2022, I stumbled on user fonglet rendering a set of portraits incorporating Wood’s aesthetic onto celebrities in fantasy armor. I had specifically avoided working with human faces because the AI had such difficulty with proportions, but I was encouraged by the progress fonglet had made with their iterations and decided to try out their prompts as well. I was also among friends and I enjoyed explaining the quirks of MidJourney including its inability to depict people. The topic of users branching off each other’s prompts is a contentious and extending tangent that I would do best to save for a later writing, but needless to say, I am fully aware of MJC003 owing itself to fonglet’s initial work.

It should also be said that the Dreams of Regret archive seeks to document nearly all my explorations in AI artwork, and thus it seems right that I include these moments when I am emulating others and when my renders prove less than flattering.

MJC003 was a project attempted over the course of several sessions. As a result, its prompt changed constantly with the various phrase trending on the server. I have given the example prompt of the armored portraits in the first row, but additional descriptors added flowers as well as some updated rendering features [upbeta and testp]. I may include more portraits in the future with MidJourney’s recent improvements to facial renders.

While Ana De Armas is arguably recognizable in these images, I was infinitely more satisfied with details that obstructed her face such as her full body armor or the way in which she is positioned relative to the viewer. The armor in particular lent itself well to the abstraction creating some Brutalist designs that look fierce and otherworldly.

Images created from July 7th to August 30th, 2022 on MidJourney’s Discord Server.

Full Example Prompt: painting of ana de armas wearing a knights armor by ashley wood, character concept, detailed, artstation, full body, side view, profile --ar 2:3 --stop 80

MJC002 - Goodbye To Everything

Visualizing lyrics from Between The Buried And Me’s “Goodbye To Everything” off of their studio album The Parallax II: Future Sequence. This is part of a larger collection (MEGAMJC002) intended to visualize the entire album. Lyrics are listed below:

“I wonder if I'm alive
Breathe slowly
Open your eyes

Can you hear me? (look what's in front of you)
An endless journey (our end)
What do you see? (what do you feel?)

Were we ever really alive?
You know this is the right choice

Let's switch off together
Let's flow to no more
Goodbye, goodbye to everything”

Repetitive lyric lines have been removed in the final text prompt. Inspiration was taken from Niko Chocheli’s abstract and ornate biblical illustrations. Early iterations manifested a bone-white color scheme, but linking a parent image of Parallax II’s concept art as well as descriptors that matched the space fantasy aesthetic (“cosmic purple”, “pastel blue”, “deep black”, etc.) allowed MidJourney to more closely match the original album art in style and color scheme (see prompt text).

Feeding off individual lines allows MidJourney a lot of room for interpretation. It’s no surprise then that its generated work was so abstract given the sparse additional text prompts. Adding terms such as “ornate” in combination with “detailed” and “illustration” tend to create a pretty consistent style of tangled, Rococo embellishments that look wild and untamed like that of unkempt vines. This “naturalistic” ornateness is most apparent in what appear to be flowers and clouds in a few of the images. Peculiarly, I also noticed several points at which the flowing embellishments would converge and create hair so that it seemed to be a women with her back turned to us.

Other obvious delineations in the abstractions were likely tied to the lyrics themselves when they offered more concrete descriptors such as “eyes” and “see”. Depictions of branching roads and stairs could be the result of terms like “choice” and “journey”, while the continuously reappearing motif of skulls is probably from “alive” and “end”.

While I have not combed through every image in this series, a large portion did not initially include Niko Chocheli’s name as a descriptor. It is curious then that the early iterations still include vague cathedral spires similar to an Orthodox Christian church as well as ocean imagery, which Chocheli illustrated much of in his book about Jonah and the whale. However, this coincidence is not unusual since MidJourney often draws on religious imagery, especially in its more abstract prompts dealing with life, death, and thought. The word “flow” could also explain the nature of the embellishments’ movement. I’ve spotted what look like hot air balloons, but I have no explanation for this apart from some technical terminology I might have accidentally used related to the practice.

Images created from August 18th to 24th, 2022 on MidJourney’s Discord Server.

Full Example Prompt: [link to parent image], [lyric], ornate, cosmic purple and pastel blue deep black, detailed illustration --ar 16:9 --quality 2