PROMPTING MIDJOURNEY FOR WHIMSICAL COMPOSITES

Getting cohesive stories, backgrounds and characters

When I first started using Midjourney for my whimsical artwork, I would often ask gptCHAT for some stories to get inspired about what I might want to build. Once I had an idea, I would render some backgrounds and then some characters and other elements and begin the composite. Often the elements and the characters didn’t have the same texture or feel, and I would make some of those adjustments in Midjourney with moodboards and style references.

But then I learned that some of that work can be accomplished with better prompting. If you ask gptCHAT to build all the elements for the event at once, then the same words are used consistently in the prompts and they translate to better renders in Midjourney.

Let me show you how.

I will use an example of a Valentine composite that I recently had published in the “Living the Photo Artistic Life” magazine.

You ask for the story, the background without any characters or just the scene, then some version of the characters that would be in the scene on a white background, and a list of other elements that might appear in the scene. I use this for events like St. Patrick's Day and Easter but you can use it for anything you can describe to gptCHAT.

Here is the prompt format:

For the STORY, keep them whimsical, visually clear, and composite-friendly. Strong “Who + What + Where” first sentence. Then supporting atmosphere and styling.

Follow the Story with a breakdown of the story prompt into two sub prompts, one for background where you only use the words that described the environment or scene. And another sub prompt for the description of the character. Then I can render the story, the scene and the character as three different jobs in Midjourney.

Finally, add a short list of additional elements that might be in the scene that I can render on a white background to supplement the scene.

Here are a few of the images I got back. Below you will see the final composite of the “Baking Up My Valentine” artwork. Do you see the images that I picked for the composite?

I've rendered my St. Patrick's Day and Easter stories with this format and they have provided me with some fantastic little stories to build!

Categories: : Midjourney