If you follow me on some of the social media like my Facebook Page, Instagram, Twitter and d.Buzz you see daily images appearing on my accounts for the Word of the Day.
The word each day comes from an email list I have operated for a couple of years called Prompt A Day. The email arrives in subscribers inboxes at 5am EST to help get their creativity sparking.
Today’s word of the day is revelation. Each day I turn the word into an image and lately a quote I write to reflect the image. I use Midjourney to craft the image and ChatGPT to provide me with background assistance.
Here's A Look Behind the Image
I’ll start with the most basic, a prompt in Midjourney using just the word to see what it generates. This morning, just the word generated some biblical tone images, likely in reference to the Book of Revelations in the Bible. I find sometimes Midjourney will pick up a theme and try to stick with it if I don’t nudge it in other directions.
My first step was to visit ChatGPT and ask for a list of synonyms. I got: disclosure, unveiling, epiphany, discovery, divulgence, exposition, insight, admittance, confession, declaration.
Interesting set of words but none of them jumped out at me as additional prompt references I’d try to use to nudge Midjourney in other directions for revelation.
The next step I’ve been using is to ask ChatGPT for a list of symbols and terms which are symbolic of the word. I find this list gives me more clues of visual elements to represent the word. The list provides me with some information on what the symbolism is.
I’m finding the symbolism an interesting way of exploring the words in addition to the dictionary definitions and synonyms.
ChatGPT gave me: light, apocalypse, burning bush, opened eyes, uncovered veil, book or scroll, dawn or sunrise, key, flower blooming, guiding star. Now that list had some interesting visuals to play with. Now to start experimenting.
As I learn more about Midjourney I’ve been building a list of various styles and prompt terms I can use when experimenting with images.
I went over my list and picked out some terms I wanted to try today. They included: mysticcore, christcore, dreamcore, earthcore, earth art, mysticpunk, cyberdelic, conceptual sculpture.
I started out using the styles with just the word revelation to see what would show up. Nothing really jumped out at me.
Next I left revelation in the prompt and added in quotes several of the symbolic terms. Playing around with the styles names, style levels and switching between the default Midjourney style and raw.
As I played with them, I noticed some of the symbolic terms showed up more often than others. Bush, open eye and sunrise was the most common to show up. The bush wasn’t usually burning when it showed up.
I removed the stronger terms from the list to see if any of the other terms would start to come through. The generated images started going in a lot of odd directions at that point.
With the spiritual symbolism being strong on the images it also occurred to me that within the Christian tradition colours change from one season to the next.
I went back to ChatGPT to see if colour served to represent revelation. I got this list: white, gold, blue, purple, yellow, green, red. Not surprising, the colour list included the colours used in the Christian tradition.
I started playing with adding the colours to the prompts to see if colour would impact the generated images. There was some very interesting trends with some of the colours. Eventually, this image caught my attention.
This is the prompt I used:
christcore, dark white and purple, revelation, "burning bush, opened eye, dawn, guiding star, key" --style raw --c 25 --s 500
I decided to play with it to see if I could get an open book into the image. I used the Custom Zoom that Midjourney 5.2 introduced. I used this prompt:
christcore, dark white and purple, revelation, burning bush, open book --style raw --c 25 --s 750 --ar 1:1 --zoom 1.5
Which gave me today’s image:
I then returned to ChatGPT to review the meaning of the symbols and the colour purple. After some thought, I came up with this quote for today:
Amid the deep purple hues, the eye views the open book for the revelation in the burning bush
I now had my image and quote for my social media posts. A trip back to Midjourney, I used the Custom Zoom again to change the dimensions of the image for the header of this post:
christcore, dark white and purple, revelation, burning bush, open book --style raw --c 25 --s 750 --ar 3:2 --zoom 1
There, a view behind the scene on how I get to the image I release each day. I’m enjoying doing the images. I get to play with the various styles and prompt elements I’ve collected together while creating the image each day.
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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