How to Write AI Art Prompts [Examples + Templates]
Creating cool AI art prompts isn’t as complicated as it might seem. You can use simple formulas to generate high-quality AI art.
Creating cool AI art prompts isn’t as complicated as it might seem. You can use simple formulas to generate high-quality AI art.
Ever feel like crafting AI art prompts requires secrets and magic? How are all of these creative professionals creating stunning, mind-blowing visuals in tools like Midjourney and DALL-E when all of your prompts fall flat?
The reality is that creating cool AI art prompts isn’t as complicated as it might seem. With the right knowledge, you can use simple keywords and formulas to generate high-quality AI art.
In this article, we’ll break down how to write effective AI art prompts from start to finish. We’ll also offer up examples and templates that you can use to jumpstart your own AI art projects.
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Before we get into the nitty-gritty of AI art prompt tips, it’s important to understand how AI art generators work. First off, generative AI applications are robots, not humans. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to remember that these generators don’t understand the world like you do.
AI art generators don’t know what an owl looks like in the wild. They don’t know what a sunset looks like in a physical sense. They can only understand details about features, patterns, and relationships within the datasets they’ve been trained on.
Prompting for a “beautiful face” is not very helpful. It is more effective to prompt for specific features such as symmetry, big lips, and green eyes. Even if the bot doesn’t understand beauty, it can recognize the features you describe as beautiful and generate something relatively accurate.
To get the best results from your AI art generator prompt, you’ll need to give clear and detailed instructions. An effective AI art prompt should include specific descriptions, shapes, colors, textures, patterns, and artistic styles. This allows the neural networks used by the generator to create the best possible visuals.
Now that you know how AI art generators work, it’s time to start crafting your prompts. Here are a few tips and tricks you can use when writing good AI art prompts.
When writing an AI art prompt, you’ll want to be as descriptive as possible about the content of your image. Is it a drawing, sketch, or 3D rendering? Should it look like a photograph, or is something more illustrated?
Try starting your prompt like this:
All AI art prompts should include a description of the subject you want to create. This could be anything from a person, animal, or object to an abstract concept or emotion. Get as specific with your descriptions as possible so the AI generator knows what to look for in its datasets.
For example:
Here’s a Midjourney AI art prompt for: “An illustration of an owl.”
Next, add detail to your prompt by including relevant information about the elements of your image. This could include anything from colors, color palettes, shapes, sizes, and textures.
If you want to generate an image of a bear, don’t just say “bear.” Explain what kind of bear it is (brown and black, grizzly or polar), its surroundings (a forest or mountain range), and any other interesting details.
For example:
Here’s an AI art prompt example from Midjourney for: “An illustration of a red owl with bright blue eyes.”
You’ll also want to provide details about the form and style of your AI art. This is especially important if you’re looking for a specific visual effect. For example, you might include keywords such as “abstract,” “minimalist,” or “surreal” to convey a certain artistic feel.
Try this:
You can also use a specific artist’s name here to mimic their style. For instance, say, “Like Salvador Dali.” Or, mention an artist’s specific artwork, like “Like Andy Warhol’s Shot Marilyns painting.”
Here is the Midjourney result for “An illustration of a red owl with bright blue eyes in the style of abstract expressionism.”
Finally, you can use keywords to define the composition of your image. This includes things like resolution, lighting style, aspect ratio, and camera view.
For example:
Here is the Midjourney result for: “An illustration of a red owl with bright blue eyes in the style of abstract expressionism with volumetric lighting.”
With these examples, you can see how each image changes as the prompt evolves.
Here are a few additional tips to keep in mind when generating AI art from prompts.
Need AI art prompt ideas? Here are some of the best prompts for AI art generator tools you can use today.
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Finding the right AI art generator for your project can be tricky. To help your process, let’s compare Midjourney, DALL-E, and Bing Image Creator. This will help you decide which is best suited to your needs.
Midjourney is an AI tool that creates pictures from words. Users can change the image size, shape, view, and more. Midjourney is known for its photo-realism images, as well as hyperrealistic images.
Midjourney also operates in a Discord chatroom. You can see how others create AI art prompts and get inspired by their work.
Keep in mind your first 25 images on Midjourney are free. But after that, basic plans start at $10 per month.
Some tips for using Midjourney:
Here’s a Midjourney example for: “A Dadaist collage of a post-apocalyptic world in neon tones and volumetric lighting.”
DALL-E is a great AI art generator trained on the concept of “imagination.” It creates surreal dreamscapes and can interpret creative concepts as well as abstract ideas. The images DALL-E produces often have a unique, otherworldly feel to them.
Unlike Midjourney, DALL-E focuses more on creative prompts and less on photorealistic images. It also follows word prompts closely and has an intuitive interface, giving new users a relatively low learning curve. DALL-E gives you 50 free credits upfront and then 15 more each month you use the service. But, those that use the tool beyond their free prompt limit will need to pay $15 for every additional 115 prompts.
Some tips for using DALL-E:
We used the same AI art prompt from our Midjourney test, ”A Dadaist collage of a post-apocalyptic world in neon tones and volumetric lighting,” in DALL-E.
Here’s what we got:
Different, right?
Whereas Midjourney focuses on photorealism, and DALL-E emphasizes creative concepts, the Bing Image Creator specializes in vibrance and detail.
Bing Image Creator struggles a bit with facial features, fine detail, and consistency of style. But it’s free to use, so you don’t have to feel bad if you don’t like your results.
Some tips for using Bing Image Creator:
Here’s the result for “A Dadaist collage of a post-apocalyptic world in neon tones and volumetric lighting” from Bing Image Creator.
There are many free AI art generators, such as Nightcafe, Starry AI, Bing Image Creator, and Craiyon. Tools like Midjourney and DALL-E also offer free credits for accessing their services.
The best AI art prompts vary depending on the tool and the desired outcome. In general, it’s best to use a combination of descriptive adjectives and specific nouns when writing your prompt. You can also use other artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to generate prompts.
To create your own AI art, use an AI art generator like Midjourney, DALL-E, or Bing Image Creator. Then, use the tool’s interface to craft your prompts and generate images.
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