Nov 13: Ravens
A new topic and new possibilities
Remember all those owls I couldn’t stop making earlier in the year? I have no idea how it happened, but a few AI ravens began showing up and … long story short, I’ve spent most of the past week making raven after raven after raven.
Part of the reason is the new option Midjourney rolled out at the beginning of the month, something they call a style tuner. It allows users like myself to create various styles based on a word and/or image prompt.1 In the process of experimenting with the tuner, I learned that styles created with a certain subject — a raven, for example — generally did not transfer well to other subjects.
One of my first styles included the following phrase in the prompt: “Extremely detailed raven on a vintage newsprint background,” which is more or less how I ended up with the first three images.
Another set of styles I created around the same time used the phrases “black and white” and “intricate linocut-style details.” I wanted to see what would happen if I combined the two styles; the image below was one of the results.2
I took a break from styles for a while and instead used a simple prompt to ask for a mandala with a raven in the center. I did not use the phrase Native American but thought some of the results were reminiscent of dreamcatchers despite that.
I began to feel a bit frustrated by the way all the styles seemed to retain whatever subject I’d started with, and wondered if it might be possible to create a style without a subject.
So I plugged some rather abstract words into a tuning prompt: “painting, luminous watercolors, nature, awe, mystery, magic, wonder, whimsy, ethereal beauty, dreamlike atmosphere, rule of thirds, asymmetric.” I wasn’t at all pleased with the raw results (which you can see here).
Nonetheless, I tried combining several of the tuned images into a single style, then used a prompt which included both the style and the word “raven” in it. Which is how the image above, which I like quite a bit, came to be.
TLDR: I can’t stop making ravens.
A single style tuner prompt creates the possibility of numerous styles.
OK, so the bird’s not exactly a raven. But it is black!