Exploring Midjourney’s AI art style using circles | by Steve Dennis

How materials, moods, and mediums affect the output of a simple circle

Sunset. A large ring of yellow light floats in the air above two silhouetted figures. A desert landscape stretches out to a towering sandstone butte. Behind it, is a circle of swirling cloud. — All images by MidJourney, directed by the author.

Midjourney is an AI image generation tool that take inputs from a human (usually through text prompts and parameters, but also other images) and uses a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge amount of image data to produce unique images.

Like most machine-learning models, Midjourney can be a bit of a black box. It’s so complex that it’s difficult to explain to a layperson what happens between the system receiving a text prompt and it producing an image.

What we can do, is explore the output we get based on the inputs we give, and look for patterns and make assumptions. This won’t necessarily get us a better understanding of how the system works, but it can help us learn how to use it better.

Note: I will frequently anthropomorphize Midjourney here. I understand it doesn’t actually think, imagine, like/dislike, or feel anything.

To best represent the detail of Midjourney’s output, the images below have large file sizes. Proceed with caution if you’re on a slow or metered mobile connection.

If you asked a random person in your life to draw you a circle they would probably find a blank sheet of paper, maybe a notepad with lines, pick up a pen or a pencil, and draw an outline of a circle.

But what happens when we ask the same thing of Midjourney?

A thin yellow/white circle glows, slightly illuminating a dark forest canopy behind it. Teal and orange hues of the fading light give way to black at the edges. — Prompt: “A circle”

You can see with simple prompts, Midjourney fills in a LOT of gaps with what boils down to weighted dice-rolls, on aspects of an image which a human would typically leave blank. Run a prompt like this through the system ten times and you’ll probably get 6–8 fairly different images with different aspects, and a lot of similar traits. Without stylistic or color descriptors, it leans heavily into the cinematic teal-and-orange look by default, as you can see here. It LOVES clouds. You can see it has quite a specific painterly look, which it also favors by default.

We can try to dial it back through more specific text prompts to get it to something resembling what a human would make.

A charcoal sketch of a ring shape. Messy and disconnected, but with light and shadow considered. Grid-lines are scribbled across the page in faint pencil. It looks like a page from a notebook. — Prompt: “A pencil line drawing of a circle”

Even still, it’s far more detailed than we’d expect from a human and still takes a lot of trial and error to simplify.

A think pencil circle on white paper, surrounded by a softer pencil circle that looks like someone might have done a pencil-rub on the bottom of a coffee mug. A dark shadow covers the bottom right corner of the paper. — Prompt: “A simple pencil outline of a circle on white paper”

Midjourney is exceptionally good at simulating different types of materials. It usually understands the basic properties, forms, or colors of many interesting materials, and we get some interesting results playing with these.

Materials and colors will help add flavor to your prompts. Experiment with combinations, both expected and odd. Pay attention to materials in your surroundings. Around me right now I see crinkled paper, black plastic, brushed aluminium, grey woven cotton, and blue foam. Let your environment inspire you.

Midjourney does very well with poetic descriptions and adjectives, but only if you’re not after something highly specific and prefer to simply invoke a mood.

The best way to use it is to leave a lot of room for interpretation and just sort of roll the dice. You’ll notice certain moods favor certain color schemes (blues for melancholy, reds for horror), but often that teal and orange will still creep in.

A warm sunrise glow bathes a floating circle made of branches, thick and dense, twisted together. It’s shape is near-perfect, with the branches on top growing lush green foliage, while the bottom is dry and brown. A figure stares up at it from below. Clouds in the sky behind it. — Prompt: “A mysterious circle”

An orange ring of flame appears to be a portal into a dark, creepy, nearly symmetrical forest. The shapes of branches might make a face, but you can’t be sure in the darkness. — Prompt: “An evil circle”

A muted cold blue sky with wispy trees to the side of the frame. A person looks up at a beige ring in the sky, filled with increasingly darker blues, like a tunnel into darker times. — Prompt: “A circle of melancholy”

A circle made from negative space. Its orange and teal coloring evokes a sunset, but the dark blue inner circle has a tree growing out the top of it which bleeds into the negative space, breaking it up slightly. Its edges are imperfect. A figure looks up at it from below, as if dreaming it. — Prompt: “An imaginary circle”

An aurora-like circle containing a second semi-circle in the night sky. It appears otherworldly. Tree branch shapes can be seen within it, seemingly growing in the middle of the sky. — Prompt: “An ethereal circle”

A dark black and red void, surrounded by a sandy circle. Shapes of people in black and red surround it, fading into a chaos of red and black noise. — Prompt: “A horrific circle”

A circular art canvas hangs on a nondescript brown wall. The outer edge of the circle is a mix of painterly dark blues and blacks, while the inner edge has white willow-like branches forming a circle, with pink and orange flowers blossoming from the bottom half. — Prompt: “A blossoming circle”

The default “midjourney painting” style can be overridden by invoking certain styles using specific keywords or parameters. Whether you want a specific painting style, a 3D render, a clay sculpt, or a specific style of photography or illustration, there’s a good chance Midjourney has a basic understanding of it.

Grainy black and white, overlapping shadows of rings and bars, lit harshly from off-screen. — Prompt: “A circle in a film noir”

An atmospheric foggy street scene at night. The cracked pavement is lit by a thin circle of warm light, almost like a long-exposure light-painting. It frames park benches, fading into the fog, with the light of billboards and street lights in the distance. — Prompt: “A circle rendered in Octane with volumetric lighting and fog”

Octane is a rendering tool for digital 3D work, designed primarily to render things with realistic physical properties and accurate lighting. You’ll see it frequently used in Midjourney pieces aiming for a specific look. You can see aspects of this in the way the ring of light is lighting the ground.

A circle that looks like a top-down view of an ancient clay pot on display in a museum. Harsh top lighting accentuates carvings around the rim. The middle a swirl of clay, as if made quickly on a pottery wheel. — Prompt: “A circle sculpted from clay”

An ink drawing of a circle with lighter lines, dots and angles. It evokes a blueprint or technical drawing without any specific text or description. — Prompt: “A technical drawing of a circle”

A circular canvas hanging on a brown wall. The canvas is full of various splotches of blue, yellow, red, orange, green, and purple, that go from light on the outside to darker in the middle, before forming a lighter center. It gives it a sense of depth. — Prompt: “A watercolor circle”

While simply stating “A circle” in our prompt makes it the subject by default, things can change a bit when we start describing the environment our subject is in. As you’ll see, given a lack of subject detail the environment can shape the subject in interesting, sometimes unexpected ways.

A landscape painting style with a field full of flowers, and a single tree in the distance. In the foreground is a circle on the ground, shown in perspective, made from pink, blue, and orange flowers. — Prompt: “A circle in a field of flowers”

Stormy seas rage at the bottom of the frame, with dark clouds looming in the background. A swirl of waves creates a circle in the middle of frame. Physically impossible, but menacing and beautiful. — Prompt: “A circle in stormy seas”

A small forest clearing, with colorful sprint foliage in the background. The clearing has a circle of dirt, maybe two metres across, like someone or something has walked in a circle for days, wearing down the grass to dry dust. — Prompt: “A circle in a forest”

A more abstract painterly scene of mountains in the foreground with a huge sky taking up most of the frame. Behind and between the mountains, an orange circle sits, the bottom of it fading into the mist behind the first mountain range. — Prompt: “A circle in the mountains”

A circle of bright light, like a door or gate illuminates a dark city alleyway. The only other lights are faint red lights from the windows of buildings. — Prompt: “A circle in a dark alley”

A huge modernist circular room, maybe a lobby, with a reflective orange circle on the floor, with a teal outer ring. Some office chairs look out a window on the far edge. orange and white ring-lighting circles the outer edge of the ceiling. Blue and yellow wall panels surround the window. It’s a space devoid of people or life. — Prompt: “A circle in a corporate office”

Aspect ratios can also drastically effect the type and compositions of images created. If you ever want to print something on a standard poster size, or use something as a phone or desktop wallpaper, get familiar with the aspect ratio parameter and use it accordingly, as it’s exceptionally hard to reformat a square image that you’ve decided you like.

Midjourney can attempt to evoke the style of a particular artist. This is one of the more ethically controversial ways to use AI in art, especially when dealing with any sort of commercialized work. While humans can and do also copy the style of others, the grey area is substantial when it’s an AI model doing the copying. This is especially (and understandably) a concern for working artists, and anyone well known enough for the system to recognize. The works are still unique in any legal/copyright sense (as of today), but it could still be frowned on by the community.

Similarly grey is the popular “trending on Artstation” descriptor, which will broadly approximate not one specific artist, but much of the type of work and styles that are frequently seen on Artstation.com, which is hugely popular with artists working in film, games, concept art, and illustration.

A yellow ring of light looms massive in the sky, rimmed with an orange halo. It’s on a sunset sky, directly above a rocky mountain range in the middle of the desert. It evokes Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with a wider and shorter mountain. — Prompt: “A circle trending on Artstation”

This article just scratches the surface. The infinite possibilities and real power of systems like this come from your (human) experimentation, direction and taste, combining all the concepts above and more to create unique works that may inspire and delight yourself and others.

A dark green misty forest with black twisted branches. A golden portal sits to the right of the frame, little lights like fireflies fly around it, possibly attracted to it. — Prompt: “a mystical circle made of tree branches and liquid smoke in the trees of a lush jungle at night. Terrifying and magical. Gold accents.” (16:9)

A large wooden circle sits in the sand, waves blown around it, like it’s been there for months. Black and white photograph style. — Prompt: “a black and white photograph of a lonely wooden circle, abandoned in the sand dunes.” (16:9)

An apocalyptic dark fantasy hellscape, plumes of smoke and fire create circles, while dark figures wander a swampy wasteland. — Prompt: “a circle of fire and smoke in a forgotten wasteland abyss.” (16:9)

Thanks for reading. You can follow my AI-generated art experiments on Instagram. If you get value from stories like this and want unlimited access to all the content on Medium, consider becoming a Medium member. It only costs $5 a month, and that money will help support me, this publication, and other writers you read on Medium.

from Medium https://towardsdatascience.com/exploring-midjourneys-art-style-using-circles-a461a78e7196