Picking up Spares and Running with Them
I am still very much playing with MidJourney, or as my friend Travis has dubbed it, Midj (I pronounce that like Midge) which you'll know if you're on Discord with me or watching my instagram. It's a fantastic tool, and it's taking time to learn how to get the best out of it, like any other art tool. Learning requires practice, so I opted to practice with the Odd Prompts today, pulling the shorter spare prompts (the long one is a bit too much, although I know that another friend is getting amazing results with Shakespeare's sonnets).
The first one is 'Braindrops keep falling on my head' and I've included the initial results, which show up as a 4-square grid. From that, I can either choose one I like, or I can run the prompt again. In this case, I wasn't looking for precise results, so I pulled an evocative result and ran with it.
Next up was
It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t Superman. Even less likely, it was a…
I opted not to upscale any of the results here, and went on to the next one, which had a lot more possibility, in my mind. Because why not ask an AI to depict itself? What could possibly go wrong?
Let the artificial intelligence play too, Timmy
The first result on this prompt had an image I liked, but I wasn't sure how well it would upscale, as the differentiation between figures over the woman's shoulder could likely go all lovecraftian on me, as Midj is prone to do.
So I opted to reroll the prompt, with a change in the aspect ratio as well, and got a nice result here, too.
I had the most fun with the last of these, as you'll see.
The minotaur switched the GPS off.
One of the things I am still loving about this program is the ability to create evocative art. These things prompt feelings in me, start the stories flowing, and it's not about the artist. The artist in this case is fondly anthropomorphized, but still it's a program running the rote algorithms that humans set up to run when given words. However, art is more for the viewer, than it is the artist. What I see, what I feel, I bring with me when I look at the art. It's tapping into my taste, my perceptions of beauty, or drama, or whatever you feel when you see an image.
After all, that's the point of a prompt. It's a nudge towards something. The rest, is up to you.