This design is partly generated using Midjourney which is a Generative AI based on the Stable Diffusion model. I’m not going to write too much about it, as there’s thousands of hours of YouTube videos on the topic you can immerse yourself in – following Tim over at his Theoretically Media YT channel would be a good place to start.
While I find ChatGTP and Google’s Bard (now Gemini?) interesting and useful for generating ideas; as a visual creative person, I do find the likes of Midjourney quite fascinating. I can simply imagine something, write a few sentences of natural language text, set some parameters and ‘hey presto’, a few variations later, out comes what I had imagined (or something way more vivid…)
As an alternative to sourcing stock footage, I find using Midjourney faster than scrolling through 1,000’s of stock images and it’s cheaper, plus a resultant image that is ‘unique’. Amazingly, the application now lets you scale an image up to 4x resolution: roughly 4,000px square or or a rectangle 5,400 x 3,600px – large enough for use on a banner or high quality full page print.
The feature image for this Post is a concept for a Wine & Art Festival that doesn’t exist. I’ve put last year’s date on it so hopefully no-one turns up expecting it expecting it to happen in 2024! I generated the main image using Midjourney plus the underlying vine and grapes background image. I then put together the advert/poster concept in Inkscape as a deep-dive into learning the application. Inkscape is an alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator — as an old-school Freehand/Illustrator user I really like what I see so far.
Below are a couple of other options that I considered when starting with the same or similar prompt (scaled down from the original images for faster page load):
