“In the style of…”
For the past couple weeks, Midjourney has led me down some strange and fascinating paths. I’ve created images of Disco Dracula, a state of oneness with the universe, a crime scene as painted by Bob Ross, a view from inside a human womb, a portrait of Charles Manson painted by Norman Rockwell, Will Ferrell crawling out of a giant burrito, and machine elves helping ancient Egyptians constructing the Sphinx.
One learning curve for me is the language of design. I’m picking up bits and pieces here and there. Just this week I learned what “volumetric lighting” means. I’m slowly accumulating the nomenclature of visual art and applying it to my prompts. One quick bit of shorthand that I’ve been including in prompts is “in the style of.” In addition to the John Currin-style portrait above, I’ve generated images in the style of artists like Yayoi Kusama, Albert Bierstadt, Matthew Barney, and Jean Michel Basquiat.
As an experiment, I prompted Midjourney to produce portraits of Joe Biden in the style of various comics artists. I chose Biden because I assume that the data set of images depicting him is vast, so the AI would have plenty to draw from. Artists I chose included Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, and Chris Ware.
It so happens that I’m friends with some of the good people at Fantagraphics Press, the publisher that has released a lot of those artists’ work. Publisher and Editor Eric Reynolds edited a one of my books and has worked with countless ground-breaking comics artists in addition to those mentioned above, and was instrumental in publishing the entire 50-year run of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics in exquisitely designed hardbacks.
I sought out Eric’s opinion on Midjourney’s output, as there are few people on the planet whose eyeballs have spent more time scrutinizing the works of Crumb, Clowes, and Ware. Here are some of the images and Eric’s reactions. — Ryan
A Portrait of Joe Biden in the Style of Chris Ware
“The Chris Ware one is weird because about 95% of Chris’s published work is flat B&W line art with flat color. I’m not completely sure what the AI is culling from. I actually thought at first that the AI images were inspired by Joan Cornella’s work, based on the painted technique and color palette, even though I doubted whether you would even know his work.”
A Portrait of Joe Biden in the Style of Robert Crumb
“I can kind of see what the AI is thinking but it’s all superficial technique. I’m referring to things like Crumb’s trademark crosshatching, which the AI just can’t really replicate in any kind of elegant way. You can see the diff in the top right Crumb AI image vs Crumb’s own work, the AI lacks the organic perfection of actual Crumb. The textures in the Crumb images reference some of the colored pencil work he’s done over the years.”
A Portrait of Joe Biden in the Style of Dan Clowes
“The only one I was really able to discern out of the gate was Clowes, even if it’s recognizably not Clowes. I was able to discern pretty quickly that the AI was trying to replicate Clowes, even though no serious Clowes fan would ever actually mistake it for Clowes (maybe in the same way you see derivative art all the time). Clowes has a common arrow in his quiver that he employs by drawing expressionless or somewhat despairing portraits of himself or of his characters with a straight, face front camera angle. The AI images are a weird pastiche of these. The hairlines in the Clowes Bidens are Cloweseque, as are the facial/cheek lines that extend from the edges of the nose, down around the mouth.”
“I don’t find these exercises particularly effective as Biden caricatures or as simulations of style. There’s actually something a bit grotesque to them!”
