Red Stripe
Midjourney Image Prompt Series
Some of you asked me how I made the Sticky series. They were made with image prompts. Midjourney’s image prompt is one of the most powerful features in the AI engine. If you’re not using it, you should!
MJ’s image prompt is not the same as Stable Diffusion’s img2img. Instead of making another image that look like the source image, Midjourney will extract key features it thinks you have in the image, then reimagine it in new ways.
MJ’s image prompts work well when you supply 1+ detailed images. But did you know that it works equally well with simple drawing schematics? This is what I tried to show with these sets.
Conceptually, these are the things I want:
- a muscular man
- wearing latex / rubber
- red stripes (on clothing and/or space)
- white modern furniture
- bauhaus sensibility
You can describe this in text but it gets complex quickly. So I went to Photoshop and mark up an image prompt (10th in set):
- black silhouette of a muscular man. The pose doesn’t matter. It just needs to signal MJ that it’s a bodybuilder.
- Red stripe
- light cyan secondary color for contrast
Based on the image output, you can then tweak the text prompt. My text prompts vary for each image. Sometimes I forgot to include the furniture in my text, and you’ll know which one! I’ve also included images here that I won’t normally publish but are good representations of how MJ interprets images.
All images in these sets come from single image prompt plus text. Some of use additional flags, e.g. --iw 0.5 for lowering the image weight, red stripes::0.5 (0.2 to 0.5) for keeping the amount of red stripes under control. The addition of the cyan was added only in some of these images.
If you don’t know what images to use for your prompt, just stick the same image above into MJ, type some text, and observe magic unfold before your eyes.
Image prompt and text prompt in Midjourney v5.1.
Images
The images are not in any particular order, but I grouped them so they can form a nice triptych on Instagram.
