Feel Like Midjourney AI Is Daunting ? Here Are Some More Prompt Tips

The shirt below is from Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei featuring a quote about “Life is Art” that appeared when I searched for AI Art images. I had to use the image; it seemed so utterly on point for what I think is happening right now for many people who have only dreamed of being able to draw or paint or create something visual.

The Midjourney AI and other artificial intelligence (AI) image tools are opening the door for new waves of creativity for those who might claim they only have their words to help them. If you ever felt that life and art could not be separated, read on for some ways to combine them.

In the last few weeks, I have published three posts to help you get started with Midjourney:

• The Basic Basics — How Do You Even Use Midjourney With This Discord Thing?
• Some (As In A Few) Advanced Midjourney Prompts (which includes a link to the Midjourney Quick Start Guide)
• Using The Seed Parameter With Midjourney

First, Midjourney is a massively intricate, yet understandable technology platform, especially if you do not have the detailed advanced expertise from using programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Some of the prompts you may see being used are coming from people who know those tools. I will share some tips to at least help you study their work. I am not a visual expert, although I have dabbled in those programs. My goal as I learn is to share the people and resources I find with you, for doing creative and cool work with Midjourney AI.

Learning from other Midjourney Experts

One of my newest finds is Olivio Sarikas who does Midjourney Tutorials (and on other programs and services) on YouTube. Olivio offers a variety of tutorials on Midjourney, but these two caught my eye. Everything of his that I have watched or read (I like to read the notes more than watch videos, in general) are excellent.

The main video I watched highlighted the work of ten artists with his commentary about how and what they have done with their advanced prompts. He has an overview document that lists out the full text of each (linked below), but first I want to show you how to get to that information, which for the most part, is public on Midjourney (as a user, you can pay extra to have your work be private).

Midjourney AI - 10 Uncommon Styles - Prompt Guide (YouTube) and here is the Google Doc where he lists out the prompts he talks about in the video. His prompt guide includes the gallery links so you can see what the prompt produced. Pretty helpful.

Finding Midjourney Advanced Full Command Prompts

In this screenshot, you are looking at the public Midjourney Gallery Community Feed page and it highlights the work of many artists on the platform. There is an arrow noting what you see when you hover on an image. This is how you find specific prompts from users whose art and images you like, so that you can learn from them and improve your own art.

Below is my profile page, with that super fancy, highly advanced art of a thumb drive (that’s meant to be funny...) and you can see the steps to get to the full command - meaning the full prompt that was used, with all the parameters. If you copy the “prompt” from this menu, you will get only the basic info.

Once you get to “Full Command” and you click the item, that is background copying it to your clipboard. Nothing else will appear to happen. You will then want to paste it into a text editor, Pages, Word file, or Google Doc, or wherever you edit your docs.

Here is an example of the prompt details you might see with a more advanced image:

Midjourney “Full Command” result:

single fly agaric mushroom:: drawed on a white canva:: botanical art:: —ar 2:3 1015566625 —v 4 —s 100

Midjourney “Prompt” result:

single fly agaric mushroom:: drawed on a white canva:: botanical art::

You can see typos, which Olivio points out, get ignored by Midjourney. I have found this to be true also and that you can relax about a lot of details, but some will not work if not formatted or written correctly. For example, the long number at the end of the full command result above is the seed identifier (I wrote about that in the earlier posts I link to above about the Midjourney Seed Parameter) and if you do not write it like this: “—seed 1015566625” you will get an error (minus the quote marks, of course.

As you can also see in the above prompts, there are additional codes or parameters and these help you guide Midjourney.

• single fly agaric mushroom::
• drawed on a white canva::
• botanical art::
• —ar 2:3 This states what aspect ratio you want (check the user guide linked in my earlier posts)
• 1015566625 This is the seed item I just explained above, written incorrectly here.
• —v 4 This is the version of Midjourney you want the service to use in this prompt — which is pretty cool that you can go back to a feature that existed in prior version and not in this one.
• —s 100 This is to stylize your request — going from zero to 1,000. The higher the number, the more stylized, more artistic.

According to Midjourney, “this Midjourney Bot has been trained to produce images that favor artistic color, composition, and forms. The —stylize or —s parameter influences how strongly this training is applied.”

The double colons that you see are meant to separate the concepts, commands, so the :: is a separator and it allows you to assign a weight, or importance to the concept as well. You can positively or negatively weight something — such as removing a color (with a negative number) or asking it to make something warmer or stronger in color.

It is possible to have the Midjourney Bot consider two or more separate concepts individually using :: as a separator. Separating prompts allows you to assign relative importance to parts of a prompt.

In the case of Midjourney, and perhaps the future of art, is the reality of leveraging terms and keywords and ideas, and numbers as weight or emphasis, just to name a few of the ways you can control and guide your own artwork. I hope you find Olivio’s work as captivating, fun, and informative as I did.

Let me know on social media how you may be guiding Midjourney or other tools to help you create.

Here’s an image of the artist, Ai Weiwei who partly inspired the direction of this post.