Getting Started with AI Art

I have had so much fun playing with Midjourney, my favorite AI Art tool so far. I’m using it to get inspiration for my crafting, and I bet a lot of other crafters will enjoy it, too. So here’s an intro tutorial to show you how to start playing with it!

A quick overview of what I’ll cover:

• Sign up for Discord
• Join the Midjourney Discord server and create your first image
• How to refine your images
• Notes and suggestions

If you want more of a quick-start guide, Midjourney has one on their documentation site, too.

Sign up for Discord

Midjourney is an AI bot that runs on Discord. If that sentence makes no sense, read on. If you’re already familiar with Discord, skip forward.

Discord is a chat app. Originally used mostly by video gamers, it has a lot of useful programming features that have made it popular among other groups. One of these is the ability to create “bots” that respond to commands that you type.

Midjourney is one such bot. Once you have a Discord account and are logged in, you can send text commands to the Midjourney bot and it will do its AI magic behind the scenes and return fascinating art to you.

So the first step in using Midjourney is to sign up for Discord. The process is a pretty typical sign-up process, but if you’d like a step-by-step guide, here you go!

Here’s an interactive tutorial

https://www.iorad.com/player/2148303/How-to-create-a-Discord-account

Next step

Note that you can use Discord from their app or their website. The website is a great place to start, and when you get comfortable, downloading the app gives you access to more features.

Join the Midjourney Discord server and create your first image

Once you have a Discord account, you can join servers. Each server is maintained by a different owner and has different features (and if you’re interested in finding servers where you can chat about crafting, those exist!). Midjourney has a server that’s specifically for interacting with their bot to make AI images.

You can join it by going to https://discord.gg/midjourney. Once you’ve joined, you’ll have access to some “newbie rooms”—you can get to them on the left sidebar by looking for an entry that starts with “#newbie-” followed by a number. Click one of them to enter the room (called a “channel”).

Fair warning: you’ll see tons of images flying by, and it’s a bit overwhelming. Try to tune those out for the time being and look down.

Creating art starts with the message bar at the bottom of the screen. In Discord, commands start with the / character. When you type it, a list of available commands will show up; if you type part of a command, the list will shrink to matching commands.

Start typing /imagine. You don’t have to type the whole word, just enough to get it to be the option at the top of the list. Then you can either click it or press your tab key, and this will put the command (complete with a “prompt” section) into the message bar, with a blinking text cursor in the prompt section.

Type in a very basic prompt like “cat” (because this one won’t be used; more on that in a second) and hit enter to send the message. The Midjourney bot will reply that you need to accept the Terms of Service before you can use it. Read through them (or don’t, if you’re legally gutsy) and click the “Accept ToS” button.

Then do the /imagine command again, this time with a real prompt! It can be anything you want (that doesn’t violate the server rules) but if you’re hung up trying to think of something, try a landscape using simple shapes. After a minute or two, you’ll get a grid of four images back!

Once again, a step-by-step guide:

Here’s an interactive tutorial

https://www.iorad.com/player/2148312/How-to-make-AI-art-with-Midjourney-on-Discord

Next step

How to refine your images

Once you have a grid of images, you can use them as the basis for more images. The Midjourney quick start documentation is excellent on this point, so I’m not going to reproduce it here. Go read it! (And then come back.)

When you see an image you like, it can be hard near-impossible to find it again in the firehose of images coming through. You can use Discord’s emoji reactions feature to react to an image with a ✉️ (“mail”) emoji, and the Midjourney bot will send the image directly to you. You can do this with your own images or those other people have created, and it makes it much easier to look through the list in your “private messages” with the bot.

Notes and suggestions

• Midjourney is not free. You get 25 images for free, which is generally just enough to get you totally hooked. After that, you’ll have to pay to keep up the fun. I’ve tried the $30/month account but have settled on the $10/month level based on my usage. The paid account gets you access to a much better interface for browsing your results and searching the whole community.
• Midjourney has a great guide showing how a few details change the look of your images. If you really want to understand how prompts affect the image, promptoMANIA’s prompt builder is incredible.
• For crafting-specific uses, I love using Midjourney to create imaginary craft projects and then see if I can make them. This means I put “crocheted” or “knitted” or “hand-sewn felt toy” at the beginning of a lot of my prompts.
• Keep a list of prompts that produced art you like. These can be prompts you came up with and tried, or prompts you saw floating by on the stream of other people’s requests. I keep a list in Obsidian but you can use your phone’s notes app, send yourself emails, write them on a notecard, whatever.
• There are a lot of secondary tools that supercharge your AI art. A few of my favorites:
  • Upscale the image. Even when you upscale an image in Midjourney, it’s still relatively low-resolution. It’s fine for display on a blog post but not high enough quality to print. With this tool, you can upload your best Midjourney image and it (another AI model, I think!) will upscale it to higher resolution.
  • Get an approximate text prompt from an image. If you are wondering what kind of prompt you could use to generate a certain style, you can upload an image that’s an example and this tool will give you an idea of what kind of prompt might create it.
  • LeiaPix Converter. This tool creates a “depth map” to add parallax motion to static images. Not something I use much but definitely interesting enough to play with once, and potentially useful for social media posting.

What next?

This is just a brief introduction. If all goes well, I expect to publish more posts that talk about specific projects where I’ve used AI art.

Beyond that, what would you like to know? I’m having a great time playing with these tools and will answer whatever questions I can, whether in the comments or in a dedicated blog post. Let me know what you want to learn more about!