The Portraits
Continuing MidJourney explorations
f you haven’t read the earlier entry, MidJourney: Exploring Artificial Intelligence–Generated Art, that page provides some useful context for what’s happening here.
After discovering Midjourney, I spent several weeks experimenting with prompts—less with the goal of mastering the tool, and more out of curiosity. This particular entry focuses on the platform’s ability to generate portrait-style imagery.
As with my earlier experiments, I approached this much like I would a photographic exercise: testing variations, paying attention to mood and expression, and seeing how small changes in language altered the results. The images below are a selection from that process.
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 completing the first series, I revisited an earlier prompt centered around a Día de los Muertos–inspired mask, introducing a few variations. Two of those results stood out immediately. The original prompt read:
An industrial portrait of a Hispanic teen boy wearing a gear-themed Day of the Dead mask with a surreal, fiery background.
From there, I continued refining and adjusting parameters—slowly getting more comfortable adding constraints and nudging the output in specific directions. What interested me most wasn’t control, but the balance between intent and surprise.
At this stage, the work still feels exploratory. The images don’t document real people or moments, but they do reflect a brief period of experimentation—both with the technology itself and with my own expectations of it.
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.
For reference, the MidJourney app is accessed through Discord and operates entirely via text prompts sent to a bot; there is no traditional user interface. I’ve shared additional experiments on my personal Instagram account, with bike-related imagery appearing on the BestRidesDC feed.
These images remain here as a record of that moment—an experiment, not a destination.