A friend of mine on twitter was talking about using this midjourney thing with their paintings.
Curiously I looked up what this even is and quickly got addicted!

If you didn't know, its a server on discord riddled with this bot ai that you give a prompt to and it spits out these crazy cool images. Most of them seem to be stuck in a similar blotchy paint style. So I was like, well, I've been trying to conceptualize a world in a story my husband and I have been brainstorming together. Maybe this could help us form new ideas?

Behold [some] of the pieces I told it to make!


When you initially give it prompts, it gives you 4 image thumbnails that you can choose to have it redo everything, create new variations of a specific thumbnail concept, or to upscale one or each of them.


You can also have it go a step further and slightly upscale it more, or upscale it to the max. I haven't done that to anything yet cause I kinda like where its at with the regular upscale. And it all consumes something, of course.
When starting out, you are on a free trial where you can make quite a lot of these for free personal use. iirc you can make about 20-24 of these depending on what actions you take. It doesn't count per image, but rather it counts the amount of time the ai takes to process (from how I understand GPU minutes). There's a breakdown in there somewhere, but basically each prompt costs like 0.87 (or something) minutes and upscaling takes like 1.10 GPU minutes, and you get 25 total.
Or pay and get more.

ANYWAY LOOK AT MY FAVORITE ONE
it makes me think of the dragons in Breath of the Wild


as for how my friend wanted to use these by painting over them and just altering them into their own thing, they found that this way is far too limiting.
But I would love to use these more for inspiration! Probably not so much pose refs since it tends to distort things a bit. But just, framing a picture, filling void space with something, or just having a landscape reference to challenge myself with?

@KDA Drew:
Thos look so cool!!


Its actually kind of interesting, about as quickly as I became hyperfocused and interested in midjourney, I just sort of... stopped? When I look at it for some reason it starts to hurt my head. I wonder if there's something about its splotchy style where my mind keeps wanting to fill in the blanks where it makes little errors. Or the limitations of it. So now I feel exhausted by it.
Or the fact that I know it isn't really art, since a human isn't making it.

Interesting. Its very neat xD