Author Skills | Fantasy Fiction | AI | MidJourney
What A Difference Six Months Made (to AI Images).
My before and after reflection
In the past half year or so that I’ve been using MidJourney, it has actually been journey! There is a lot to learn about how to generate AI images, and some of the I created early on were… kinda mid.
The one used in the following story, for example…
It has a certain medieval art style, I guess, but it doesn’t really bear closer inspection.
All the same, it felt transformational at the time. I’d struggled with illustrating fantasy and sci-fi images using Unsplash, and even sites like Pixabay (as well as requiring more hassle) didn’t have much to choose from.
In fact, a quick scroll down the contents page of my web-novel Sorcerer (from which the chapter above comes) shows a bit of history in terms of how I started to use Midjourney, and how it improved. Bear in mind that Chapter one dropped in April 2022, at which point (and for the first 16 chapters) I was using stock images.
The list and thumbnails can be quickly see in the page below:
Chapters 17 and 18 feature some of the first MJ images I used, and they still stand up fairly well, though there were plenty of terribly bad ones generated along the way, that didn’t make the cut.
Scrolling further down the chapter list (ignoring Chapters 30–36, at which point I’d clearly used up my fast GPU hours!), you can see how things move on. I feel that there’s quite a jump in image quality by Chapter 37, which dropped in January 2023, and the kobolds image below is cool, too:
These were still based on version 4, though. MidJourney V5 came out in mid-March, and again, further on in the list of chapters you can notice a difference. I think this one is almost good enough to be on the cover of a fantasy novel:
While I’ve still got a lot to learn about using MJ to its best, it has certainly made some things easier. For one, my web-novel features a blood hound; there are only so many stock images of that breed of dog, many of which really don’t look suitable for a fantasy setting!
This was what MJ version 5 managed for Sorcerer, Chapter 63:
The header image of this article is another example of how things have moved on. In this case, I replaced the main image of an article that I wrote back in February 2022. You can see how it looked before:
After upgrading the image (and also trying a new heading), this is it how the same article looks now, with a bit of MJ art:
I think it’s a lot more eye catching (the heading is now in title case, too, and I used one that scored higher on a headline analyser tool).
Below is another example. Here, I used MidJourney version 5 to remix the same prompt and image that it had produced a few months before. I think the difference speaks for itself.
While I could have gone for an entirely new image, I wanted to see what MJ would come up with through developing the same original. The prompt was not especially complex:
A fantasy monster, stone background, shadows, a demon, fantasy art, dramatic and scary --v 5All in all, the rapid uptick in quality AI images has been a real boon for me and the other fantasy/sci-fi authors writing on Medium, and no doubt on other sites that host web-fiction, too (apart from Tapas).
Here a couple more very cool fantasy images which got some great comments from readers:
I can’t wait to see what the next six months will bring.
For more about creating great images on MidJourney, check out the ever-informative tutorials by Sweet Chaos, such as this one.
Thanks for reading! You can find my fiction here, as well as all of my advice and guidance on creative writing right here. Or avoid missing a thing by getting all my posts direct to your inbox! 🧠
