Not long ago, I began making art with the AI art-generating platform called Midjourney. Midjourney is a platform you can use via Discord to create art with only a few words. You type in a description of what you want and, presto, you get mind-bogglingly beautiful and interesting artwork. For an example, here are four images that the AI threw up when I typed:

“The Last Supper, futuristic, light coming through windows, sci-fi, outer space, interplanetary, high detail, octane, photo realistic, wide frame”

Bizarre, weird, strangely familiar, and really cool.

Using the platform seems to still be a new thing, and certain descriptions are more useful than others when “nudging” the AI in the direction the artist (author? describer?) intends. If this is something you are interested in, below are a few tricks that have worked for me.

Being Clear about the Style

Think of the AI as someone who literally knows nothing about art, but they have a full library of sections of artwork with different categories. All it can pull from is what exists out there on the internet, so you want to do your best to point to whatever section of the internet it is you want it to pull from.

One way to do this is to describe the kind of medium you want to use. Do you want it to look like a charcoal drawing? An oil painting? A 3D sculpture? Put that in there.

Mixing Faces

A method I use to keep consistency in the facial features of my images is to ask the AI to mix two or three faces every time, which it does surprisingly well. When I was trying to create an image for St. Kateri, I typed in that I wanted the person to look like a mix of specifically two famous Native American women: Crystle Lightning and Alex Rice. This threw up varied portraits, but in every portrait, the woman looked largely the same.

Experimentation with a Thesaurus

You never know what new thing might appear when you add a word the pushes the AI in a new direction. Sometimes giving it a description that has nothing at all to do with art, per se, can bring about what you are envisioning. It at least makes for fascinating works! Here are a couple that surprised me.

Here is one where I included the words “psychedelic trip” and “chaotic.”

This one’s description included this famous Catholic quote: “Make me a channel of your peace, where there is hatred let me bring your love“

Whatever you think of it, this is an amazing new way to create beautiful artwork. If you enjoy using it like I do, I hope these tips help you out as well.

Why Catholic AI art?