5 Best Midjourney Prompts: January 2024 (Arts & Crafts)
Playing around with art materials and techniques in Midjourney.
Happy Thursday, image imaginarians!
I’m back with another monthly dose of Midjourney prompts.
(More accurately, these are strong modifiers that change the look of your image. The full prompts themselves should come from you, in natural language.)
I’ve been doing these Midjourney prompt posts for over a year as they tend to be popular. Still, I’m thinking of retiring them as a regular monthly tradition to make room for other articles. Please vote in the poll at the bottom to help me decide.
Now let’s take a look at this month’s descriptors, which all have to do with forms of art and art materials.
Note: All sample images are Midjourney Version 6.
Prompt #1: Fire it up!
Midjourney prompt:
“[subject], pyrography”
What it does:
Pyrography is essentially a fancy term for “burning images into wood.” You take a pointy, heated tool like a specialized wire-nib pen and go crazy.
It’s Greek for “writing with fire,” which is just the type of badass term we’d expect from a place that brought us Hercules and influenced virtually every branch of science known to man.
Sample images:
Prompt #2: Relive your school years
Midjourney prompt:
“[subject], diorama”
What it does:
Dioramas are typically miniature 3D recreations of a scene. You’ve likely made a diorama for a school project at one point. Midjourney is pretty convincing at turning “diorama” prompts into tiny miniature replicas of the subject matter.
Sample images:
Prompt #3: Use a template
Midjourney prompt:
“stencil, [subject]”
What it does:
Stencils are used in many areas of life by kids, students, or graffiti artists. The general idea is to use an intermediate screen with holes that let ink or paint through to create a repeatable pattern. Midjourney tends to go in the street art direction with this prompt.
Sample images:
Prompt #4: Paint in color
Midjourney prompt:
“gouache [subject]”
What it does:
Gouache is a type of opaque paint that dries quickly and tends to give strong, saturated colors. Midjourney returns vibrant and expressive images when you combine your subject with the “gouache” prompt.
Sample images:
Prompt #5: Fancy a stone print?
Midjourney prompt:
“lithograph, [subject]”
What it does:
Lithography is a printing method that uses a smooth stone or metal plate that has the desired pattern drawn on it with a greasy substance like oil or wax. When you apply ink to it, the ink sticks only to the greasy parts. You can then press the plate onto paper to “print” the image onto it.
Because lithographs can use colored ink, Midjourney may return a mix of dark or color images. You can try to steer this by adding “color” or “grayscale” to the prompt. (You can also use “chromolithograph” if you want the color version.)
Sample images:
Over to you…
Enjoy exploring the new modifiers.
Remember: You should try to experiment by using them in other text-to-image generators.
Finally, now is your chance to decide the future fate of “Midjourney prompts”:
Want to share your own prompts or creations?
Leave a comment or shoot me an email at whytryai@substack.com.
The full list of Midjourney prompts lives in this ever-expanding guide:
Daniel, you must be getting pretty good with MJ by now. Want to collaborate on something where I write some stuff and you generate like 3 images?
I'd rather you keep them coming regularly, but at this point since you have so many prompts, maybe you could put together a collection of the best of them in an article or even a paid ebook. I would pay for that.