The Portraits
Continuing MidJourney explorations
If you haven’t read my previous Journal entry, MidJourney: Exploring Artificial Intelligence Generated Art, I urge you to take a peek to understand what’s going on here.
I discovered the platform nearly a month ago and have been playing around with it and trying to come up with interesting prompts to fuel my creativity. This past week I spent some time exploring the platform’s abilities in generating portraits. Like before, the results were pretty mesmerizing. Here’s a series of images I prompted MidJourney to create for me.
ABOVE: Prompt: “a young hispanic woman with braided hair wearing a day of the dead mask with a surreal fiery and hellish background behind her.”
Not sure why this prompt popped in my head, but the results were, I think, pretty spectacular. These are curated variations of the same image. I kept making versions and ultimately upscaled my favorite 4.
BELOW: Prompt: “a young hispanic woman with brown braided hair wearing a carnival mask with a surreal heavenly background behind her”
For this series I wanted to get away from the original “dark and eerie” feel of the first. Like before, i kept making variations of the same image and upscaled my favorite four. Again, MidJourney delivered…
After the series above I decided to run my original “day of dead mask” prompt with a couple of variations, below are two of my favorite from the prompt: “an industrial portrait of a hispanic teen boy wearing a geared themed day of the dead mask with a surreal fiery scene in the background
I kept plying with the original “day of dead mask” prompt with some additional variations…
Prompt: an industrial portrait of a hispanic woman wearing a geared themed day of the dead mask with a surreal fiery scene in the background
Prompt: an industrial portrait of a hispanic man wearing a geared themed day of the dead mask with a surreal fiery scene in the background
A variation of the cover image for this Journal entry.
Prompt: an industrial portrait of a Scandinavian girl wearing a day of the dead mask with a surreal Asgardian scene in the bbackbround
BELOW: I decided to bring the “fire” back into the images and ran this prompt: “portrait of Greek goddess Medusa emerging from a fiery volcano.” This time around I added a few extra parameters, including hyper-realistic and a different aspect ratio. All three are upscaled versions of multiple iterations of the original image.
BELOW: Finally, I ended the series with a tribute. Having learned that Nichelle Nichols passed away earlier today I prompted the MidJourney Bot to create the images below from this prompt: ”portrait of Nichelle Nichols emerging from a star field with a nebulous background”. I added multiple parameters, including generating an image of how she may have looked in and around the mid 70s.
I’m finally getting a bit more comfortable injecting additional parameters into my prompts to make the images look more the way I want them. My next leap will be to see if I can generate a self portrait. Stay tuned…
The MidJourney App is currently open to anyone; you must have a Discord account to take advantage of it. There is currently no actual User Interface (UI) and all imagery is generated via text prompts by messaging the MidJourney Bot directly. I will be posting more of my imagery directly on my personal Instagram feed, along with any bike related art on my BestRidesDC Instagram feed.