Welcome aboard. Typically I like to go down rabbit holes and bring people along with me. My first post will be about using https://www.midjourney.com/ to help me create a few shirts for a festival in late summer. I plan on putting all my learnings and process in the post. Feel free to comment if there are better more efficient ways and I will add your comments and name.
My Planned Process
Human Inspired –> AI-Generated –> Human Edited –> AI Upscaled.
- Step One Select a Style
- Step Two select the subject matter
- Step Three Send to the bots.
- Step Four: Bring back into Gimp for human edits
- Step Five: Upscale using AI
Selecting the correct art style to start with. I am really leaning towards a mashup of the following art styles.
Neo-Impressionism:
Fauvism :
–> There is a great resource on GitHub for styles: here
Subject matter. I am thinking of something that is not extremely busy but easy to recognize. The festival is in Chicago and focused on House Music with a touch of Techno.
- Headphones
- A SL1200
- a TB303
- Chicago Skyline
- A Record
- Lights
- Dancing person
I started my process with the midjourney bots. After about 15 prompts I decided to focus on Fauvism and changed records to record crate. I am looking to get a very colorful, stylized image and am not getting anywhere near what I want.
My prompt ended up like this: a classic milk crate full of 12-inch rave records that an old school DJ would take to a rave while complaining about who new people are all digital, white background,Fauism –ar 2:3 –stylize 550
I ended up with these because I spelled Fauvism wrong in my prompt. simple proofreading goes a long way.
I then spent hours on hours trying to find prompts that would give me something I was looking for. I ended up zoning in on 6 very specific subjects for my prompts
- Headphones
- Dancing
- Smiley Face
- Speaker
- Disco Ball
- TB 303
Using the following prompt on midjourney I was finally able to use something. I absolutely love the colors and think this will look good on a dark shirt.
“dj style headphones with wire, no background, fauvism –ar 2:3”
Next drop this into Gimp and clean up some of the weird AI artifacts. One day I may be able to afford Photoshop.
I did the same for five more images. I do not love the smiley but I will roll with it. Gimp for basic editing then off to GigaPixel for AI upscaling.
The one other thing I did was set a couple of backgrounds to transparent. This is fairly easy in Gimp. Do the following.
Transparent Backgrounds in Gimp:
- Open Image in Gimp
- Right-click on the background layer
- Select Add Alpha Channel
- Select by color
- Select the background and hit delete.
- Save as a PNG with transparency on
Now I have 6 images inspired by me, created in midjourney, edited in Gimp, and upscaled in Gigapixel. I have no idea how to sell these or what to do next. I will try a few print-on-demand houses and see what comes of it. Feel free to comment if you have found better ways to do any of the above.