Art Method Lab

Have you ever generated a set of images in Midjourney and gotten multiple “styles” all at once? Perhaps one image will be almost photographic, another will be painterly, and another might be 3D rendered.
Have you been trying to create your own style and it keeps fluctuating just a bit too much?
This might be because you haven’t properly selected a medium. Even with a very detailed prompt if you haven’t selected a medium you are rolling the dice. Let’s take a look at how mediums work in Midjourney and how you can use them to get consistent prompts.

1. Definitions
2. How to use the medium
3. Examples
4. Troubleshooting

Definitions

Before we dive in let’s define a medium and how it’s different from style. The word medium commonly describes not only the substance but the materials, tools, and the techniques used in a certain artwork.
An art style describes the way artwork looks. Style is determined by characteristics of the artwork such as, color, form, composition, and the use of various media.

How to use the medium

When it comes to Midjourney the medium is technically (and obviously) digital. However we can reproduce traditional media and mix them in novel ways. Here are some categories for you to think about: substance, surface and technique. Substance is the most common way of specifying medium, for example: oil paint, chalk, watercolor. You may also specify the surface: canvas, wood, concrete. Finally, you may also specify various techniques such as: cross processing print, dry brushing, collage, light sculpture, etc.
When using Midjourney note that everything you don’t specify is randomized. The easiest way to get a consistent outcome is to specify the medium. Rather than bog you down with endless explanation, let’s look at consistent and inconsistent styles as produced by Midjourney. I will use basic prompts, no prompt weighting. The prompts for each will be shown so that you can test these for yourself. 

Examples

As you can see in the above photos, the images are very inconsistent, they vary wildly from painterly, to 3d render, to photographic and sometimes a mixture. Admittedly these prompts are absurdly simple, but they demonstrate the point well. Now let’s begin to specify mediums and see how consistent we can make things.

As you can see, we simply began to specify parts of the medium and the “styles” are immediately more consistent (Apart from the weirdness of the camera in the jaguar pictures, the wrong camera at that…).

Let’s take a look at a more complicated prompt.

We can see that the above prompt is fairly consistent and there are a number of medium elements that we specified: brush strokes, the quality of the colors, type of lighting and shadows. We also specified a genre, impressionism. This saves us time because Midjourney already understands the mediums associated with that genre. For our last example let’s take a look at a slightly more complicated prompt that is inconsistent.

The top left image has a 3d rendered look. The rest do have a sort of digital painting look, but they aren’t quite as similar as you might want if you are trying to maintain a style.

Troubleshooting

Ok so let’s assume you have taken pains to specify a medium and still your style isn’t as consistent as you would like. A few points to consider:

• How long is your prompt?
  • If your prompt is too long, Midjourney may ignore part of it, try shortening the prompt.
  • You can also try moving the medium elements toward the front of the prompt.
• Do you have prompt weighting?
  • Ensure that the medium elements are grouped together
  • Make sure that the weight of that section is strong enough to have a noticeable effect.
• Are you using an image reference?
  • If your style elements are coming from your image try increasing the weight of the image, you can do this using regular text weights or by using the --iw parameter.
  • If your style elements are not coming from your image, try decreasing the image weight. Again, there are two ways to do this. For a more in-depth explanation, see this article (see the sections on prompt weighting and image prompts).
• Are elements in your prompt at conflict?
  • At times you may want to add a bit of photographic realism to your painterly image. But if you don’t balance this properly with prompt weights the photography medium may take over.
  • I generally advocate separating weighted prompts into 2 sections: subject and style. If certain medium elements are very important, they should be part of the subject (generally, emphasize this part considerably more than the style).
  • You may also need more than 2 sections: Proceed with caution! Balancing multiple prompt weights gets tricky fast. You need to have each part in well-balanced sections that work well together.
• Lastly, is the prompt just too complicated?
  • Sometimes there are just too many elements and if they all have the same weight, the prompt is often unstable.
  • If this is the case chose which elements will be the main elements and increase the weight or reduce the weight of the others. This tends to help stabilize prompts.
  • Consider eliminating some elements.
• Bonus!
  • Check out this site to get an idea of the styles Midjourney knows.
  • Also as far as mediums go here are a list of techniques and genres.

I hope this helped you understand at least a bit about how to create more consistent prompts. If you need more help understanding prompting, see this article. Once you have mastered the prompt, check out this article about how to perfect the details of your images.

If you’re in the mood for art, see here and here. I always welcome comments, questions, and concerns. Check back later, more content coming!