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Text Prompts Best Practices
Text Prompts Best Practices

Tips for creating the best text prompts for A.I. art output.

Updated over 2 years ago

Try visually well-defined objects

Visually well-defined means something with a lot of photos on the internet

Try: Wizard, priest, angel, emperor, necromancer, rockstar, city, queen, Zeus, house, temple, farm, car, landscape, mountain, river

Strong feelings or mystical-sounding themes also work great

Try: “a sense of awe” “the will to endure” “cognitive resonance” “the shores of infinity” “the birth of time” “a desire for knowledge” “the notion of self”

Try describing a style

Examples: “a cyberpunk wizard” “a surreal landscape” “a psychedelic astronaut”

Try: cyberpunk, psychedelic, surreal, vaporwave, alien, solarpunk, modern, ancient, futuristic, retro, realistic, dreamlike, funk art, abstract, pop art, impressionism, minimalism

Try invoking unique artists to get a unique style

Examples: “Temple by James Gurney” “Father by MC Escher”

Try: Hiroshi Yoshida, Max Ernst, Paul Signac, Salvador Dali, James Gurney, M.C. Escher, Thomas Kinkade, Ivan Aivazovsky, Italo Calvino, Norman Rockwell, Albert Bierstadt, Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte, Ross Tran, Marc Simonetti, John Harris, Hilma af Klint, George Inness, Pablo Picasso, William Blake, Wassily Kandinsky, Peter Mohrbacher, Greg Rutkowski, Paul Signac, Steven Belledin, Studio Ghibli

Combine names for new styles: “A temple by Greg Rutkowski and Ross Tran”

Try invoking a particular medium

If the style is unspecified, it will lean towards photorealism

Examples: “a watercolor painting of a landscape” “a child's drawing of a home”

Try: painting, drawing, sketch, pencil drawing, w, woodblock print, matte painting, child's drawing, charcoal drawing, an ink drawing, oil on canvas, graffiti, watercolor painting, fresco, stone tablet, cave painting, sculpture, work on paper, needlepoint

Speak in positives. Avoid negatives

Language models often ignore negative words (“not” “but” “except” “without”).

Avoid: “a hat that’s not red” “ Try: “a blue hat” Avoid: “a person but half robot” Try: “half person half robot”

Specify what you want clearly

Avoid: “monkeys doing business” Try: “three monkeys in business suits”

If you want a specific composition, say so!

Examples: “a portrait of a queen” “an ultrawide shot of a queen” Disco Diffusion v5.1 [w/ Turbo] - Colaboratory

Try: portrait, headshot, ultrawide shot, extreme closeup, macro shot, an expansive view of

Too many small details may overwhelm the system:

Avoid: “a monkey on roller skates juggling razor blades in a hurricane”

Try: “a monkey that’s a hurricane of chaos”

Try taking two well-defined concepts and combining them in ways no one has seen before

Examples: “cyberpunk shinto priest” “psychedelic astronaut crew” “river of dreams” “temple of stars” “queen of time” “necromancer capitalist”

Try to use singular nouns or specific numbers

Vague plural words leave a lot to chance (did you mean 2 wizards or 12 wizards?)

Avoid: “cyberpunk wizards” Try: “three cyberpunk wizards” Avoid: “psychedelic astronauts” Try: “psychedelic astronaut crew” (implies a crew shot)

Avoid concepts which involve significant extrapolation

Avoid: “an optimistic vision of an augmented reality future” Try: “a solarpunk city filled with holograms”

Avoid: “Clothes humans will wear 12,000 years into the future” Try: “wildly futuristic clothing with glowing and colorful decoration”

Creative Compound Words Also Work

Punk style list: cyberpunk, nanopunk, biopunk, cyber noir, steampunk, clockpunk, dieselpunk, decopunk, coalpunk, atompunk, steelpunk, islandpunk, oceanpunk, rococopunk, stonepunk, mythpunk, raypunk, nowpunk, cyberprep, postcyberpunk, solarpunk, lunarpunk, elfpunk, atompunk, neonpunk

Existing Collections and Sets Also Work (Example)

Tarot Cards (Major Arcana): The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, c, The Sun, Judgment, The World

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