Machine-dreamed art blend
Let’s get this out of the way early: I love AI—specifically Midjourney—as a spark for creative play. But there’s one thing I love even more (well, maybe besides skiing), and that’s using Midjourney to mash up my own paintings with some not so clever prompt engineering.
Take for example the painting below, Hidden Wookie 20” x 24” mixed media on canvas board (Wookie should be capitalized, right?) This was created back in 2022 by me. Painted through an intuitive process, it mixes structure with play. Layers of paint, tape, and color build into a figure that’s both simple and strange—part collage, part cartoon, part accident. The Wookie creature just popped out, literally in my head and said “Hey I need to go into your painting!” That is part of my creative process, listening to the voices in my head 😜!
Original painting
The original painting used to influence Midjourney
Keep in mind, when I paint I by no means think of using it in Midjourney, although that may be an experiment for another day. When I’m in Midjourney, I upload my painting and start my supreme prompt engineering, in this case I used the prompt: “skiing” pretty good right? With these I like to keep it simple yet the results are anything but simple, in my mind, they are sublime.
The Midjourney mash-ups
Midjourney Mashup 1
Midjourney Mashup 2
Midjourney Mashup 3
Midjourney Mashup 4
I think there is more than enough information in the painting already, also, I just want the Midjourney engine to be free. The beauty is in the simplicity, the elegance of two minds coming together to create something no one would ever dream of. I like how it also took my original signature and tried to re-work it into the final render. Also another thing I noticed is that it took the “face” from the painting and added it to the skier.
The colors, the collage effect that I love in my work, the random composition choices are all golden for me. I have yet to remake these once again back into paintings but that, my friend is yet to come.
So thats my first post, it was fun, if you like the original painting, you can buy a poster from my website. If you liked this post please share.
If you like Hidden Wookie, you can get the poster.
