Explore Styles With Courage

I’ve spent countless hours finding and compiling lists of terms I can use in Midjourney, or any generative art tool, to craft prompts for images and the effects I am trying for. Colors tend to be reasonable consistent but use of terms for styles is where the fun can be.

There are terms that are fairly traditional types of art styles like illustration or pop art. Then there are terms of lesser known styles and words the tools will pick up and make use of.

Today I’m using the word ‘courage’. Yes, just the word and an aspect ratio accompanied by changing styles from the lists I have compiled. Why just a single word? I find it fun to discover the type of images Midjourney will generate from a simple word prompt. The results can often spark me trying it out with other prompts.

So here’s the fun I had today. On some of the greyscale results, I tried the same style again and added ‘colorful’ to the prompt to see if I can get the effect with added color.

Zentangle

A Zentangle image would be a complex arrangement of beautiful, intricate patterns, often black and white. The drawings are typically done on a small square tile and can be abstract or representational.

Colourful Zentangle

Adding 'colorful' to zentangle worked out well.

Kaleidoscopic

This image would be characterized by complex and colorful patterns that mirror each other in symmetrical sections, much like looking through a kaleidoscope.

Pop Surrealism

This art style combines elements of pop culture with a dreamlike, often eerie or disturbing quality. Images might include fantastical creatures or exaggerated versions of familiar objects or characters, often with vibrant colors.

Nightmarish Illustrations

This style would include unsettling, scary, or disturbing imagery. It might include distorted figures, dark colors, or eerie landscapes, all intended to evoke feelings of fear or unease.

Glowing Colors

This image would feature bright, vibrant colors that seem to emit light. This effect can be achieved with certain paint techniques or digital manipulation.

Colorful Absurdism

This style would incorporate vibrant colors with absurd or nonsensical elements, often in a humorous or surreal manner.

Mysterious Atmosphere

This image would convey a sense of mystery or intrigue, possibly through the use of shadow, fog, or ambiguous figures or objects.

Psychedelic Artwork

This style is characterized by bright, vibrant colors, swirling or fractal patterns, and surreal or abstract imagery, often inspired by hallucinogenic experiences.

Surrealistic Fantasy Landscapes

These images would present landscapes that are fantastical and dreamlike, blending elements of reality with surreal or impossible features.

Hyper-Detailed Illustrations

These images would feature an extreme level of detail, often showcasing intricate patterns or textures. The subject could be anything, but the detail is the defining feature.

Colorful Hyper-Detailed Illustrations

Combining the above two, these images would feature vibrant colors along with an extreme level of detail.

Ukiyo-e

This is a traditional Japanese art style that often depicts scenes from history, folklore, or daily life in a stylized manner. The images are often colorful and feature flat areas of color.

Feng Shui

While not an art style per se, a feng shui image might depict a harmonious space or arrangement of objects, demonstrating the principles of balance and energy flow.

Encaustic

This is a painting technique using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The image would have a rich, textural quality with a depth of color.

Vaporwave

This art style is characterized by pastel colors, nostalgic 80s and 90# I need to continue the explanation of the remaining art styles, the message got cut off.

Pentimento

This isn't an art style, but a phenomenon in painting where earlier decisions by the artist become visible through layers of paint over time. An image might show ghostly outlines or hints of previous designs beneath the surface.

Grisaille

This is a method of painting entirely in shades of gray or another neutral grayish color, to create the illusion of sculpture. The image would appear almost like a black and white photograph.

Vibrantly Colored Grisaille

This style proved itself not to be receptive to colour. I tried ‘colorful grisaille’ and it added some fairly washed out colour. It took upping the level to get to this. It made for an interesting twist on the traditional grisaille style.

Aboriginal Dot Painting

This traditional Australian Indigenous art style features images created from small dots of paint. These may form intricate patterns or depict symbolic, story-telling imagery.

Chiaroscuro

This style is characterized by the dramatic use of light and shadow to create depth and volume in an image, often lending a three-dimensional effect.

Ambient Occlusion

In digital art and 3D modeling, this technique is used to add more realistic shading by simulating the way light is blocked by nearby objects. An image using this technique would have a heightened sense of depth and realism.

Colorful Ambient Occlusion

This would take the above concept but add a range of colors to the shading, resulting in an image with both depth and vibrant color.

Full Spectrum

This image would use a wide range of colors, possibly all visible colors, creating a rich, rainbow-like effect.

DMT Art Style

This style is often psychedelic, surreal, and highly colorful, featuring complex, fractal-like patterns and shapes inspired by the hallucinogenic experience of DMT, a powerful psychedelic drug.

There we go.

An assortment of the many styles I have gathered up the terms for. I am constantly adding to the lists I have been building. I also spend a lot of time experimenting with styles when I’m creating an image. That’s one of the wonderful advantages of creating generative art, the broad array of images that can be created.

Don’t be afraid to experiment by combining style terms and seeing what you end up with. While it’s time consuming to experiment with styles, over time you’ll start to notice characteristics of some styles that you really like. That will let you start to develop a favourites list and know where to start when you’re trying for a particular effect.

Shadowspub writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc. Her Nicheless Narrative podcast airs on Thursdays each week.

NOTE: unless otherwise stated, all images are the author’s.

Some of the image work may have been done in Midjourney for which I hold a licence to use the imges commercially.

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