How I generated awesome NFTs and merch in no time using an AI generator aka MidJourney!
I discovered Mid journey about a week ago and I just cannot stop using it for the moment, this thing is like a drug for my creative mind.
Let’s put this in context. About a month ago I posted on Linkedin about a quick test of DALL-E ( now Crayion ) and even if I was impressed at that time, I wrote that we should not yet be afraid of losing our jobs ( for the Illustrators and graphic designers out there ;) ). I was assuming that it would take a couple of years for this AI to become competitive against us…
God, I was wrong!
Last week I saw a post from Chris Do on Linkedin and I saw something amazing.
It was an artwork done using something called MidJourney, another AI art generator tool.
This time I felt bad, this revolution might not take years in the end but probably just a couple of months.
I decided to give it a try straight away.
By entering their cool website I was able to register for the beta free trial program ( and I think you can still access it as well ).
When you enter their Discord it feels like a hive filled with frenetic creators from all around the world discovering a new toy.
There are almost 1 M people in this Discord, (which is actually the technical limit for a Discord server)and to be honest, it was the first time I saw that amount, even if I was used to the overcrowded NFT Discords from the early time ^^.
I followed the instructions and started to write a couple of prompts to feed the AI.
Here are my 2 first prompts :
Pretty simple prompts but usually you are a bit shy the first time.
The way you ask the AI to create an artwork makes me think about these ancient greeks who were doing some kind of divination and asking questions to the Oracle about the weather, the issue of a battle, or something like that and having to make sense out of natural elements ( or “signs “ ) to answer these questions.
You can actually generate up to 25 prompts with the free trial after you need to pick one of the paid plans ( which I did of course ).
Being in these channels where you can see all the art people are generating feels so inspiring, that’s part of why you just cannot stop.
I played a bit more with the tool and started to generate some pretty cool art.
One of my first thought was that as the basic plan cost 10 dollars a month and allow you to generate up to 200 artwork a month, it will soon be bankrupt for some of the Fiverr illustrators and graphic designers.
The cheapest ones on Fiverr start at 10 dollars for an artwork, and it can take up to 5 days to get the result.
Here we are speaking of 200 artwork for 10 dollars and with instant results, that’s a no match.
I generated these Pikachus and that’s when I thought about doing merch and NFTs with it.
Unfortunately, Redbubble told me that the Pikachu was falling under the copyright terms and therefore I would not be able to use it for stickers on their platform, so I mumbled a bit to myself and decided to create more original art so I would not have that kind of restrictions.
Side note, I asked the thing to paint a self-portrait of itself and the result was: 2 men and 2 women, as if the thing knew it was human, half man half woman ^^’.
I started exploring how to generate a little collection with a common theme and different variations of it.
I chose Cats as a subject and asked the AI to paint portraits of cats, mimicking different famous masters such as Claude Monet, Leonard Da Vinci, and Andy Warhol.
Often, the first shot is not the best, the results might have 3 eyes or 5 legs. You need to do some trial and error to reach something really decent but that’s part of the fun.
I then did some iterations and curated the results to prepare my first collection.
In the end, I got a pretty nice collection of 10 different cats generated by the AI as you can see :
I turned them into a little NFT collection on Opensea. ( If you are into NFTS and want to support me, this woudl be a great way to do it ;) ;) ).
and I started making merch out of them as well, I think it has quite good potential!
Even though I was pretty confident about copyright issues this time, I still got a message about my Picasso cat, but after further review, they said that it was ok ( the cubism is not copyrighted after all ^^’ ).
Now you might think that it’s cool and you might give it a try but, is that all?
All these years of research to make some nice NFTs and a few custom pillows?
I think we are still scratching the surface and amazing things are gonna come up out of it.
I tried other prompts to see what could be the other use cases and here are some that I think are pretty promising :
Or industrial design,
You can even add a link to a picture in the prompt !
If you want to read more about what are the possibilities with the prompt, here is a tuto from MidJourney about it.
I think it will really help creatives ideate and prototype faster! And it will also allow some creatives who don’t have a medium of expression yet, to express themselves!
Now we can not speak about MidJourney without speaking about the people who might be losing jobs.
It will probably bring a lot of changes to the creative industry in the next months and years, especially for illustrators ( because basically what we ask an illustrator is to create an artwork from a prompt ( that’s what MidJourney does, cheaper and much faster ).
The 3d designers are still safe for the moment as the AI doesn’t ( yet ? ) Generate .obj and similar files.
The web designers are safe as well, as it cannot make a full website for you yet.
But if you are an illustrator, I would recommend you to start learning new skills.
These new tools are going to revolutionize the industry for sure.
My advice would be to try to embrace this wave and learn how to leverage it best, instead of fearing it.
The most value will be from people who will be good at creating prompts making the AI do what we want and curating the results to pick the best ones.
You should definitely give it a try!
If you want to see more of my experiments, let’s connect on Linkedin!
Link to MidJourney website.
