Midjourney for pros: artists as a brush 1 — what is possible
In a series on Midjourney for Pros, we explore how far we can go in terms of style and quality (part 1), how to apply stylistic prompting in a real-world marketing setting (part 2) and how to create a unique style for your work (part 3).
Most Midjourney created images are publicly visible on the company’s Discord channel. Browsing reveals that nearly all images are middle of the road — we have seen this kind of images a lot, a mix of male fantasy dream and boring stock photography. If we take our artistic or professional work serious, then we have to explore left and right of that middle. We have to explore how to create a unique style with Midjourney.
In this series we introduce the concept of “Artist as a Brush”. Before we delve into the concept, let’s enjoy a gallery of images that show what is possible with Midjourney.
We take a single prompt:
“The Bored Ape NFT”
Then we experiment how different and artistic expressions we can coax out of Midjourney. To remind us, Bored Ape NFTs are serialized, handdrawn renditions of an ape with clothes and a bored facial expression. A few years back, NFTs with these images were objects of bubbly speculation in the somewhat shady crypto world.
Let’s analyse our prompt. It shows something that doesn’t exist in real: an antropomorphized ape. What we don’t want is an ape or a monkey that looks like a real one. Given that Midjourney allows what is not possible or at least difficult to achieve, we won’t be satisfied with simple drawings. For this exercise we want hyper-real 3D renderings of bored apes. Let’s enjoy and then look at how to get there…
What is possible with Midjourney
All these images (we spare you the other 25 we collected) were done with the prompting attribute — stylize 1000; in Midjourney version 5.2, this creates very elaborate, more creative and richer renderings. But it also delivers more uncontrollable results as the human in the last image shows.
What works not
So, how do we get there? If we just prompt:
The Bored Ape NFT — ar 16:9 — v6.0
then we get this:
These are not bad images. But they don’t do what we want. Three of them are too realistic ape renderings. And yet not real enough. The very first one doesn’t look like an ape, but more like Ceasar from the movie Planet of the Apes. We don’t want “real” images because we don’t want to lie. Compared to our gallery, these images are bland, boring, normal.
The solution: Artists as a Brush
Midjourney allows to use artist’s styles to create our own. The use is fairly simple:
The others are fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, photographer Nick Veasey, David Trubridge again, sculptor Wangechi Mutu and sculptor and installation artist Kader Attia.
Not every artist’s name generates images that have a certain uniqueness and artistic “body”. The images I showed are a hybrid of hyper-realism and artificiality and thus come with some form of 3D quality.
It is not likely to achieve that visual with a Van Gogh.
The first step in using Midjourney like a pro
Let’s experiment wildly. Take the subjects of your interest and let Midjourney express it through the lense of artists. You can start with the artist we used in this article. It is notable that they are all contemporary. They either use contemporary visual styles or are photographed like this.
If you need artistic inspiration, then visit the fantastic site Midlibrary.
The creator Andrei has collected over 4000 artist styles and tested them in Midjourney. This is an invaluable resource for Artist as a Brush. If you ever use it as much as I do, I’d suggest to do the same as me and support the project via Patreon.
A final note: When we want hyper-realistic images like those above, we still use version 5.2. The newest version, 6.0, creates too realistic as of January 2024.
In the second part of the series, we look at a real-life example of how to create a cover image for an article in a magazine with the Artist as a Brush technique and what we can learn from it.
In the third part, we dive into the creative process of creating a truly unique style with Midjourney.
Stay tuned!
In case, you are interested in our previous Midjourney musings:
We leave this article with a quiz: which filmmaker is used as a brush in the prompt below?
