Emulating Artist Styles: The Ultimate Guide

Folder: 2023-04-22 – Emulating Artist Styles

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🎬 Prompting Methods & Experiments Series 🎬

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I'm really curious to see how people will respond to this video.

I personally see 3 potential reactions:

1. Some will be intrigued by the underlying questions
2. Some will think it's pointless (e.g. waste of time)
3. Some will be snarky, pointing out how these models were originally trained

If you fall into the first category, then I think you'll find some of my results surprising and maybe even fascinating.

I originally asked myself whether it was possible to emulate or replicate an artist's style in Midjourney. Obviously, we all know that we can simply reference the artist's name in the prompt. But what if you wanted to avoid doing that? I can think of many reasons why some may not want to. You might not care, but hear me out.

So tried to figure out a more or less formalized process for crafting a custom style prompt that would achieve a similar, albeit not perfect, replica of any given artist's style. And while the process did not work equally well in all examples, some of the results were surprising, to say the least.

Things got very intriguing when I started to compare prompts with the same seed. And I already know what some of you may be thinking: "Well, you used the same seed. Duh!". That's not how seeds work. If the only thing controlling an image was its seed, then why on earth are we adding stuff to our prompts!? Well, because it's not all just in the seed!

So trust me, some of the examples I'll be showing you today are downright shocking. In my opinion, it raises some very interesting questions that deserve some of our attention.

When we reference an artist's style in our prompts, is it really using that artist's style? Or is it just an amalgamation of the style of the particular art movement that the artist belongs to?

If this piqued your interest, then make sure you tune in!

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⏰ Timestamps ⏰
00:00 Emulate Artist Styles
00:30 The Reference
02:24 Extracting a Style's Essence
07:19 Apply the Style
09:32 The Showdown

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#midjourney #midjourneyai #midjourneyart #aiart

[vincenzosalvia]

Impressive! Those examples look almost identical!

[KimberlyGoh]

Thanks so much for this video, Christian. It's especially helpful to see your thought process and how you set up the reverse engineering experiments. Lots of lightbulb moments!

[AG_before]

2:51 'Don't lie. ' 🤣
Great video! Fantastic way of referencing a style. Take it a step further and mix artists' styles and we're onto something even more. The inspiration is endless. Thanks for this. 💯

[GrantWylie-ly]

About time Christian, I've been waiting for your next video!

[TheoreticallyMedia]

Nice choice for Art Adams, he's long been a favorite artist of mine. I strangely once found myself in a conversation with Art and Mike Mignola where they were talking about how great Bill Sinkevich is. Art mentioned he once told Bill about a New Mutants cover he always loved, and Bill offered to give him the original. Art accepted, but only if Bill would choose an original piece from Art that he could return in favor. Art received the New Mutants cover, but never received a trade request from Sinkevich.
Art jokingly concluded that it's because Bill doesn't like any of his artwork, and to this day, that is the only thing that drives him: To make a piece of art that will impress Bill Sinkevich!

[nahiddotai]

This man is a GENIUS! In a few minutes he (basically) recreated a famous artist's style without referencing his name in the prompt. The images are strikingly similar, and for some of the images I even thought that the created style was better than the artist's style - just my personal preference. Thanks for this awesome video!

[RetroAiUnleashed]

AHHH this person is up set with you tube!!! I never got notified about this video!!! Thank you Mr. Heidon 😊

[kozavr]

In all last 4 pictures the subject from the images created using directly the artist's name is bigger, it fills the 2/3 of the picture. To make the two sets of pictures even more similar, you can add something like "close-up"

[Skilic]

Thanks a lot fornyour incredibly informative videos Christian. I really love the experimental approach that you convey in most of them and how concise they are.

[yveskeroack]

Thanks for this! I noted that artists style applied using their name work well although most of them add elements that are not always appropriate for what we want to achieve: some will depict a certain period, or favor one ethnic group or even add people to a scene. You are providing us with a way that has a great potential to get around this! Thanks again!

[lgrindrod]

GPT4 is so polite. It warms my heart.
Chris: Thank you sooo much. You have no idea how enormously useful your video is. ✨✨✨✨

[robo]

Christian, another excellent video. I'm loath to using an artists name because it's their art after all. I do like to follow their "school" of art though. I've been doing a kludgy job of researching the artist style to come up with how they were trained and using the characteristics of the "style" they were taught to create similar looking art but your method is genius and so much faster. Thank you for sharing.

[steveshipleyauthor]

Many thanks! I learned a great deal including (1), how to use CGPT to optimize prompts for other apps / use cases, and (2) the value of a precise style guide to help improve my prompting.

[MrJoe]

Christian, excellent video as usual, plus I think you've hit on a central idea for systems like MJ

You could identify the concepts of anyone's art by using /describe on a large selection of their works, then identifying the N (10, 20, ... your choice) most common phrases out of all the phrases used for each work by all evaluators.

And I think you've hinted at embedding -- since the training images were probably described by human evaluators, the "in the style of" set of artist style descriptions could be essentially embedded vectors of smaller concepts.

[graphiydesign]

Thanks for your videos and tutorials… appreciate your works as always, keep it up Bro!

[DarkSolZero]

Just discovered this vid. I'm not finished watching it, but I found it interesting that you have an ethical hangup over prompting using an artist's name, yet you are perfectly willing to prompt midjourney into giving you output that uses his style. You must know full well that midjourney will still be accessing work from his portfolio in the dataset, so in the end, seems like a lot of effort for very little gain. I do respect the process however, and discovery is key, so if you stumble into a method of gaining consistency across subjects as a result, that I can get behind.

[neamedia]

This is a great video - once again! 💯 thank you for this cool tip!

[lightbluedev]

This method makes me feel better about using certain styles 👍 thanks.

[writerlass]

Fantastic - so interesting - and useful! 😊🙏

[purplexpiggy]

can you get the art style details from an image with an unknown/unfamiliar artist? I want to use midjourney to create a collecrion of images based on my personal drawing style but i dont known how my style be described.