You might remember the last post involved a variety of images featuring stylized human hands. The prompt I used to create many of them was “illustration of hand with spiral in the palm, southwestern style.” I incorporated a fairly high chaos value and Midjourney delivered the image below, right in the midst of a bunch of actual hands. I have no idea how it got there but I love the result. It’s a fine example of well-balanced asymmetry.
In completely unrelated news, I’ve been following the work of Björn Steinbekk, an outstanding Icelandic drone photographer and videographer who’s been documenting the recent volcanic activity there.1 The patterns lava creates are often quite beautiful and I was curious to see what Midjourney might come up with along those lines. I asked for “patterns in flowing lava” and used one of the hand images as a style reference. This was one of the results I liked best.
All that fire and lava, combined with the birdlike creatures, got me to wondering what a phoenix rising from the ashes of a volcano might look like. I used the image above as a style reference, asked for a phoenix, and voilà!
Never content to leave well enough alone, I then used a one-word prompt (“birds”) along with a style reference including each of the first two images in this post. The result was substantially less explosive than the phoenix but I liked it every bit as much.
Here’s just one of the videos Björn shot which inspired me.