Fantasy Illustration with Midjourney

1. Introduction to Fantasy Art with Midjourney: Hi, I'm Vanessa. Welcome to my Skillshare course, fantasy illustration with men journey. Now I know what you're thinking. Doesn't mid journey just make the images for you? The answer is yes. But if you want the best images possible, the ones that you were actually imagining in your head. It's not likely that mid journey will render exactly what you want. And so this course is to teach you how to use mid journey more as a tool to get to the final result that you truly desire. Or maybe you're not even sure what mid journey is because this is new technology and MIT journey is a chat bot through discord that generates art via text prompts. You sign up for this service. You get your own private chat room and you can type in the image you want e.g. a. Ferry sitting on a mushroom and then mid journey will generate to the best of its ability, what it thinks you're after. Cool, right? The problem with mid journey is, well, there's multiple problems. But maybe the first one that you'll come across is that it is a computer and it doesn't completely understand things the way that we do. So quite often, it will generate things that don't really make sense. People with strange proportions, hands are really blobby. Eyes tend to be kind of weird, and so on and so forth. So you can literally sit for hours and tweak your prompt to try and generate a good image that you can use on its own. But it's very difficult, especially if you're looking to make a fantasy illustration with many details and setting, wardrobe. Another problem with my journey, because technology is there's issues around copyright and as an artist, That's a big deal. So basically right now, they're saying that you pay for the subscription. You own that the images to do with, as you will, however, that doesn't necessarily grant nude the copyright because you did not physically paint the image yourself. There was in the court's eyes, very little, little minimal human inputs into that piece of artwork. Well, that's kind of getting developed on the cord side of things. It makes the usage of what we generate difficult. I myself like to submit a lot of work to stock agencies. Stock agencies aren't readily accepting AIR. I'm not sure around the usage terms of any of the other art generators, but I do know that mid journey gives the images to you if you are a paid subscriber. So that does mean that there is a free trial. You can generate, I think it's 200 images, which sounds like a lot, but it's really not due to the way that journey works. And then it goes up from there to a ten dollar a month subscription, 30 dollar a month subscription and so on. So in this course, essentially what I'm going to be teaching you to do is to render multiple different elements for your fantasy illustration and combine them in a photo editing app. I will be using Photoshop, but if you have a different editing app, a lot of them will work. So here you can see some examples of what was rendered and what I created with these rendered elements afterwards. 2. Rendering your Images in Midjourney : The first step in creating our fantasy illustration is to actually render the elements that we want to use in mid journey. So here you can see that I have brought up my image journey chat in this chord, and I'm going to share my settings with you. These might vary depending on what particularly you are working on and your preferences. But I have the MJ version three, style, high, high-quality, two times the cost. However, most of the time I'm usually in relaxed mode, so that's not a problem. Fast mode for this video because it can take quite awhile when you're in a relaxed mode. Regular upscale public mode, because it costs more money to have a private chat, as well as the re-mix mode, which you probably will want to have enabled because it will make this go so well and help you keep the consistency in your elements. So to begin generating our images, we have to first type four slash imagine. And that will create a prompt box. First to type in what it is we're looking for. Now you can do this in any order that you want. I prefer to kind of set the stage by prompting my setting first. So let's say that I want to create a evil fairy, deepen the woods. So my setting will be deepen the woods. And I can add whatever details I think I want to that and start crafting my prompt. Now when I'm at the end of the prompt, there's going to be a section that I recommend you add to all of your prompts. And that's going to be your stylization or specific prompts to help keep each generated element consistent with the style. So you're not going to have something that's a pencil sketch over here and something that looks like water or painting or oil painting over there. And you're trying to mix them together. That might be cool. But for this, we're trying to keep it the same. Which can be difficult with my journey because it can be so random. I will teach you how to do that and my tips for keeping your elements consistent when we get to the end of the prompt. So I am looking for and illustration of, let's say, the enchanted forest. Then it knows that we're looking for something magically. I also do start my prompt, usually with an illustration or a painting or a photograph, depending on what I'm trying to create, as well as ending it with the same, then everything in the middle just kind of changes. But we want it to be spooky. Read be hanging moss, dark, damp. Now, here's the part where we put in some prompts to help us keep it consistent when we move forward. And what I'm going to write here is I'm going to type in muted colors so that the image will pop up with subtle colors and not bright vibrant colors. And I will put that on all of my images and it just kinda gives it the color directions so that when I want to put these pieces together later, I have less color correction to do in my photo editing app, muted colors. And the next thing that I want to do that I've already mentioned that it's illustrated. But one thing that you can do with mid journey is you can reference other artists. And it will try to create the image to look like it was created by that artist, e.g. now, this can be problematic. I know for sure and I'm sorry, I can't remember the name off the top of my head. But there is an artist that a lot of his work is being used to teach mid journey. And lots of majority proctors like to put his name in there prompt and they get very similar images to his work. So I think he's actively trying to do something about this. And ethically That's kind of up in the air, how people were going to land. So my advice here is to use an artist that has passed away, long gone. The artist that I like to use for this reference is an actual fantasy Illustrator. His name is Arthur Rackham, and I love his work, but the most important thing here is that his work is so old that now it is in public domain, which means that essentially. I think anything created after a certain date every year it changes, but it's somewhere in the 1920s now things that were created before the 1920s become public domain and are accessible to other people to use and remix and whatever without any copyright issues. If I want to reference work that was created pre 1920s, There's not going to be any legal issues there in the coming years because of developing copyright laws. Around mid journey. You can follow that advice or not. That is just what I do for myself because I don't know what's coming in the legal realm of generating art. And I want to keep it as clean as possible for myself. So I will be using Arthur Rackham as my reference point. You can use him as well if you'd like, or you can find another artist that suits your needs. Alright, so now I take in the style of Arthur. Welcome. And here's where I type in my ratio. Typically I'd like to make my background's horizontal landscape and that will give me more of a stretch. I feel like composition wise, mid journey knows how to lay out a scene better. If I give it the length wise, I can always crop it later. It's just a preference. But to do that, dash, dash AR, this is for the ratio 32. I'm going to hit Enter on that. Now, mid journey works in steps. A lot of steps. If you're trying to render, I don't know, eight or ten elements for your images. You're gonna go through quite a few different renders, quite a few different steps. This is not as instant the Internet would like to make you believe. But we're getting started here. As we can see, we have some deep dark forests rendering. And although they're blurry as they start to come in, I'm already liking what I see, the color tones than moodiness. It's all going very much in the direction that I wanted it to. Now we can render more than one thing at a time. It does kinda make it slow or put things in queue. But while that's rendering, we can start to think about, Okay, what's the next thing that we want to have in our deep dark forest. And so I'm thinking an evil fair eight, but we don't want to just have an evil fairy want to really paint the scene. So let's say that she's like the evil fairy queen. The queen needs a throne. So let's go ahead and try to prompt a throne fit for an evil fairy queen. Again, imagine, I'm going to start writing my description. Illustration of a throne made out of, I mean, we could go all Game of Thrones and make it swords or something, but I really want to keep this natural. So let's go with like say, Well I'm thinking trees, but that might blend too much in the background. Let's go Stone, made out of stone. Let's describe it a little bit further. Let's say it's ornate, detailed skull did symmetrical. What color should we make this dome? Let's make it pop. Let's make it a whites, because everything else is gonna be pretty dark. Weight. Ornate, detailed, sculpted, symmetrical weights. Rock in the shape of a chair just to double makes sure that it knows what we want. And also in the style of Arthur Rackham. Now, because I'm trying to prompt a throne which typically is more of this shape than this shape. I'm going to change the aspect ratio so that mid journey has the appropriate ratio for the composition that I want it to try and create in. None of this really matters because we're going to be changing. The image to be whatever ratio will be one later on, It's just that when it's trying to lay out its images, trying to prompt a throne that goes this way into a aspect ratio that's lengthwise. It just doesn't work as well. So I switched back and forth depending on the element that I'm rendering. So now that we've hit render on that, let's take a look at what we have for these backgrounds. And I love all of them, but I'm trying to envision pieces like I'm putting stuff in there so I don't want it to be too busy or I want areas that are gonna make sense if I put something there. And two of them look like they have paths in the middle. And I like that because that would be a natural spot to maybe put a fairy queen. Whereas the other ones don't so much look like it's got a natural spot, so I've already narrowed it down to two. Now, between these two, I can't really tell which one I like best. I think I'm going to render both of them and then that will give me options moving forward. So I'm going to go with 2.3 and I'm going to upscale those two and we'll see what we get. We have Thrones that are already starting to render. Now, these don't really have any colors to them and that's okay. Remember I didn't, I didn't put in this prompt muted colors. If I hadn't, maybe it would try to fill it more with colors. However, I wanted the stone itself to be mostly at neutral. And because I'm not using any of the background elements of these Thrones. It doesn't really matter that these stones turned out to be neutral renders. Now the bottom corner one is not a full thrown. So I think that one's out already because I'm going to want the full thrown to be in image. I'm leaning towards the first one. Alright, so we have our throne and we have our. So I'm thinking maybe what we can render now is our evil fairy. Now I typically rendered the person separately from the outfit or dress. Because I find that when I tried to render both together, I either get a really good face and mushy, weird kind of blobby outfit or a really cool outfit and mushy, weird blobby face. So let's start with the outfit. And if I describe a specific dress, like if I want to type in historical Victorian level blah, it will do a pretty good job rendering something along those lines. So before I type that in, I think I am going to do a quick Google search just to get some prompt words that will help along the lines of creating a dress that is actually stylized, something that I like rather than a random blobby dress. Alright, so I found here a curdle dress, which is something that I've never heard of before. But taking a look at it, it's very medieval fantasy looking. So I'm going to try this in my prompt and we'll see if it does a pretty good job creating a curdle dress. An illustration of a hurdle, medieval curl dress. Okay. What color do we want to dress to be? Detailed? Texture and deep purples. In the style of Arthur Rackham. Dash, dash again, address vertical ratio 233. Okay, Well that is rendering our dress. Now it's time to take a look at what we have happening with our setting and are thrown and, or thrones are completely done. They look kinda funky. But let's scale that one. And we have both of our backgrounds, our upscaled. So now we have the option to premaster them. Now while I actually just liked them as they are, but I always hit remastered just to see what else it comes up with. It might be something better. I don't always love the premaster option when I'm trying to create illustrations because sometimes it takes it more into a photorealistic realm, but it's worth checking out. So we have our remastered backgrounds, we're rendering. We have our stone upscale rendering, and we have our, we have our girdles rendering. One of our backgrounds is done re mastering. And I have to say, well, it's cool. It actually has less color and stuff then the other ones. So I don't think that I'm gonna go with the remastered option for this background, but we'll see with the second one looks like. Alright, here's our second background. This one is starting to look a little bit swampy. We again have lost quite a bit of color. It looks very neutral and our path is gone. It looks like water. I think I'm gonna go back and look at the remastered images and decide between the two which ones I want you to use. And I will upscale them to the max. I decide on this one. I like this one. It looks like it's got some thorn bushes happening in the background. It has our path. It looks very much in the style of Arthur Rackham, which for consistency reasons It's important to stick with that has more color than the remastered version. So we have our setting figured out and it's upscaling to the max setting is done, are thrown. We can also try to remastered. So let's check out what the throne looks like. Well, it's remastered and decide between those two, which one we want to use in the final illustration. Now our curdle dresses are ready to pick. Let's take a look here. Three out of four of them are full length, which is what we're looking for because we don't want to have to proper image. The third image in the four is very close up. It just looks like fabric, so we're definitely not going to pick that one. We can upscale all three of the ones that are full length and go from there to see what we get. I do really like the purple color of these. They were not too dark, which is good because we're going to want our various stand out against the dark background. Okay, we have our remastered throne and I actually like it better than the other ones. So we are going to go for the remastered image on this one. So I'm going to upscale that one and our throne will be done. So now we can actually start thinking about our fairy queen herself. Now when I think of Evil Queen, she's gonna have like long black raven hair and kind of moody mysteriousness about her. Now we don't need the full length of hurt. We want MID journey focus on her face and her features. Rather than trying to render a full body, we want something that will be able to combined with the full body of the dress. So I'm just going to be aiming for like a portrait. Maybe chest up, maybe even shoulders up, is all we really need for the Faerie Queene so that we can get a high detail in the face for our illustration. Now while we craft that prompt, we can really master these purple dresses and see what we get with those. Alright. Imagine. I just wanted to note that if you want to make it easier on yourself, you can render your person to have short hair or Heron and up do. It makes it easier to cut out later. Midtone does like to do a lot of the flying around hairs which can be a pain in the butt to try and crop out. It's a preference thing. Just letting you know tip. If you don't want to spend a ton of time masking out hair to request that has their hair up. Let's give her purple eyes to match her dress. Now I can't guarantee that mid journey will follow this instruction, but we can try mysterious purple eyes and long black hair and steely in the style parser rock. Let's start beautiful in there somewhere. Portrait of a beautiful fairy queen. It just makes it pay a little bit more attention to what we're asking. If we want it to be beautiful versus nothing, It might think that we don't care what that element looks like. So now we can take a look at our remastered dresses. I actually think that this time re mastering the dresses made them look more illustrative than the other ones. So that's kind of interesting. Either way. One of them's kinda cut off at the shoulder, so that would be difficult to use. We have to redraw in or clone stamp in the top of the dress so that one's a Nobel. This one I actually loved. She's standing to the side. It she'd got as you can see, we'll just open this right up here. She's got a little bit of a head there, but it's a perfect example of how the dress looks gray. There's buttons, There's callers, there's lace, but her face is just not right. So this is what I mean by by it can do a lot, but it just tends to not do everything all at once. It can only seem to pick one element and really put focus on there. So this one's definitely contender. Even the hands aren't too Too bad. She's holding something which means that we will have to render something for her to hold. That that makes sense in the image, but that's totally okay with me. So this one is a maybe. Let's take a look at the next one. The next one, it has the full dress in the image. It's not cut off. Her hands are up and down her, she's got one leg. It's not the end of the Worlds. I can add a second leg by copying and pasting that one length there. I think I like the first one best. She's holding some kind of basket she doesn't really have hence for us to work with. And it's just not quite as lovely and detailed as the other ones. So the second one is gonna be our dress, upscale that one. So now that we've chosen our dress, this is going to dictate which image of the fairy queen herself we're going to be able to use the dress, has her facing to the side, so it's not going to make sense if we use a straight on illustration of a face because, I mean, unless we're trying to go for the creepy has her head turned in weird directions. But for the most part, I'm not trying to do that. So keeping that in mind, It's going to be part of what I take into consideration when I'm choosing the image of the fairy queen herself, the ongoing to use. Here we go. We have our fairy queen. But like I said, she's mostly facing forward in these images. And that doesn't work for us now that we've chosen a side profile dress. So I'm going to have to re-mix the prompt, which is great because you get to see how to re-mix. Now, looking at D's, I feel that the first one might be the best as far as trying to get her to turn her head because it's a little bit tilted already. Re-mix lets you change the images. But it doesn't change it a whole lot. To go with the closest one already is the best option, depending on what we can get this to do, we might have to just completely start again with the prompt and try to have are facing to the side. But we'll see what we can do with re-mix. To use the re-mix option, we're going to click on B1, which is going to create variations of our first image there. And it brings up the prompt. Now we can rewrite the prompt as much as we want. Add things, take things away. And it will still try to keep the output similar to the first image that we have. So for this example, we really just want her face into the side. So instead of saying an illustration of a portrait, we're going to change that to illustration of a profile so that maybe we get that profile shots. Illustration of a profile of a beautiful, beautiful fairy queen. And now we want to have her again. We want to add as much as we can to try and demonstrate that we want her facing the other way. So we're gonna say facing the other way. Looking to the side. Magical looking woman replies, bubble blah, all that still good. Let's see if it understands what we want. We hit submit, and now it's going to render some new versions of that first image. Again, she's still not really looking to the side. It's a little bit tilted to the side. But taking a look at that and taking a look at the dress, I think we want her turned a little bit more. It's not the end of the world. Like we could probably make it look like she's standing to the side and turning your head. But I think we would be better off if we could get it nudged just a little bit. Because this tries to make it so much the same as the versions. I think instead of using the re-mix option, I'm going to type an entirely new prompt with the profile looking away all these things and see what we get. Matching. An illustration of the profile of a beautiful. Let's skip beautiful because now we don't want it to focus so much on her face. We want it to be from the side. So let's get the beautiful and just say I'm a fairy queen. Looking the other way. Facing the side, turned to the left. It doesn't matter. We can flip it either way. Then we'll add our descriptions of what she looks like. I'm trying to put that at the front because right now we're really focused on that. And that's kinda the important piece is to get the direction right. And then it will focus on what she looks like. Magical woman. I'm going to leave up the mysterious purple eyes. Again. We don't necessarily want to see her eyes. So I'm going to leave that off and it might make it easier for mid journey to understand that we don't want to see her face directly, that we want to see it from the side. Long black hair though. Long black hair. And see Lee in the style of rock. Alright, it's blurry, but I think we got some that are facing towards the side. So we're gonna be able to work with that. That is so weird. It was almost done and then it disappeared and started over again. It might, I've never seen my journey do that before. Why is it doing? I guess it didn't like those ones. It's just like I got to try again. It's too bad. I was going to pick the fourth one. So weird. I was all prepared to pick the third one. And then it said it was 100% done and then it spits out completely different images. This is really weird. I've never seen mentioning did this before. I'm new technology. Okay. I don't love these, but I think two is the closest. So I think that I'm going to just versions too. I don't need to change anything. I'll just submit and it will try to give me different versions of that one. That was really bizarre. Really bizarre. I'm so glad I got that recorded because I've seen that before. Really likes free, She's beautiful. Then the new changer. Okay, well, I'm gonna remastered three. I'm going to upscale this and remastered three and it might be what I want, but I might have to keep going. This is the problem with men journeys. Don't always get what you want. And this is why I tried to Photoshop and edit things to work well, but still it could take some time. So if that ends up happening, I will stop the video and render as much as I need to render and switch around my prompts until I get something that works. Especially because it seems to be acting very strange this afternoon and unpredictable and just changing the image is at the last second. So I don't really know where we're at with that, but we'll move forward when I finally get our evil fairy queen. Now taking a look at the image that we chose for the dress. Now her pose has her holding something. I'm not really sure what it's supposed to be in this image, but I'm going to want to change that into what I choose. I'm taking a look at this and trying to decide what I think could possibly fit into the same pose. And I don't know, I think maybe we should try a sword. So I'm going to try and render an illustration of a sword. And if I feel like that doesn't work, then I might try some other prop, prop ideas until I finally get something that's going to work. Basically Record every step of this. You guys get the gist of it. I'm going to continue rendering with the same in the style of Arthur Rackham with the illustration, maybe add muted color if I feel like I need to add that to the prompt to keep things consistent and remixed three role until I get what I want. I continued on to also render some wings for our ferry character. And now I have all of my elements rendered. They are two ways to save this to your computer. Click on your image and discord. It brings it up. It says open original. You open the original. You can right-click and save image as it tries to save it as a web file rather than a PNG, which is typically what you're going to want it to save us. And I don't know why it does that. So fail proof way of going to your images is to go to the mid journey website and take a look at your gallery. So we're going to go mid journey.com. We're going to look at our own personal gallery. And we can sort these two only see the upscale. So here we can find all of our pieces in our gallery. And we're gonna go through and click on the ones that we want. And there's a little save icon. And you save that and it will just download right onto your computer. These save as a PNG file. It's just an image file. I'm not really sure why they save as PNG rather than JPEG, which seems to be more common, doesn't really matter. So don't get too hung up on that. Here I have all of my elements for you to take a look at. I've got my prompts with the, it looks more like a dagger than a sword. And the throne. We have our setting and our pieces for our character. These are gonna be all of the elements that we will assemble in photo editing to create our final image. 3. Upscaling your Images : There are different of scalars on the Internet. I like to use tiny wag.com. I have just never had any problems with it and never had any reason to try and find a different one. So that's what we are going to use today. Tiny well does have an issue where sometimes if an image is larger than 2000 pixels, it will tell us to resize it. So you can then go into photo editing app, resize it to the longest length of being 2000 pixels while keeping the ratio proper. So it doesn't get all weird and stretchy and then bring it back into tiny well, so we might run into that problem. And I'm doing this one first because I think I suspect this one might do it exactly. Error. Images over 2000 pixels in height and width are currently not supported. So I'm going to click Okay, I'm going to just minimize this because it's going to take me literally seconds in Photoshop to fix this. I think while I'm there, I'm going to check all of the other images that I need. Make sure that they are also under 2000 pixels. I don't suspect that our background setting will be because if you remember, I chose the remastered version. So this file should actually be smaller than what we saw those wings that, but let's take a look. Image size. I'm correct. The largest of the two, the width is 1,536 pixels. So this one's actually okay. I can just click and close that because we're not going to have a problem up sizing them. Now this one is a remastered one, so it probably will need to be resized image size. Correct? The height is 2,432. So since this is locked here, I'm not going to have a problem if I just go back and zeros, zeros 00, it resizes, it keeps the proportions proper. I click Okay, and it's just tiny bit smaller. So control save is going to save it in the file location that it was. It's not going to create a new file, is overwriting that one. And that one's done. Now I'm gonna do the same thing to the other ones, just making sure that the largest side, whichever whether it's width or height, it's locked, it gets changed to 2000 pixels exactly. Say, this is something that you do a lot. You can create an action on re-sizing. I would recommend that you do a different action depending on each ratio because you don't want to skew anything. If, say, e.g. it's a square and you try to resize it to something that is a different ratio, that action might not work well, but you can go ahead and create an action and that will even speed up the process faster. Now that we've resized our images to be compatible with tiny while, we know that we can bring them all back in and use the up scalar. It uploads the file. And now you have the option of upscaling it two times or upskilling it four times. Now, depending on what the image is, I would recommend maybe up-scaling your prompts to only be about two times because they don't need to be super huge. They're going to be a small element in your image. Whereas say e.g. the setting, the background layer, you're going to probably want to increase that by four times. So these wings are a medium-sized, but I think two times will probably be okay for this image. And now we can click Download. And it will save to our device under a new name, which is the old file name was tiny wow, added to the front of the file. And then we click start over. We do this for all of our elements until all of our elements have been up-scaled. Unless you're doing the method where you have combined them before upscaling, and then you only need to upscale your final image. 4. Assembling Elements in Photoshop: Congratulations, you've completed the second step of making your fantasy illustration with MIT journey. Now it's onto the third step and this is assembling the image in your photo editing software. I'm using Photoshop, but I've also done this exact same thing with procreate. It will help you if you have skills with photo editing software that will make it a lot easier. But I'm gonna do my best to keep it simple. For those of you who maybe are not super savvy with Photoshop. Now the main things that you're going to need to do with Photoshop is be able to mask your items, which is essentially adding a layer, draw or paint on that will hide pieces of the image. So this is how we're going to essentially cut out our pieces. And this is the first step in Photoshop, is the assembly. And when we're done that you might say, it doesn't look quite right. It's still looks not very cohesive. And that's the part where we start to get into maybe color adjustments, adjustments and stuff like that to tweak it to perfection. I'm also going to show you guys how to fix or remove items that maybe you don't want there just to clean up the image a little bit. And we'll be using clone stamp tools, healing brush, and probably even the patch tool for that. Here I've brought in all of my images that have been upscaled from tiny wow, into Photoshop. I will begin by copying and pasting my elements onto the setting. Here I have copied and pasted the throne element onto the background setting. If you're using the latest version of Photoshop, you can go to the Properties panel and hit Remove Background. And it will automatically try to cut out the item from the background. It usually does a pretty good job. But as you can see here, some of the background is still in the center. And there's, I'm shadowing that was left down by the legs here. So these are things that I'm going to have to take out and mask myself on the Layer Mask here. This is the layer mask. And what you do is you can color on it with the brush and either black or white to hide and remove parts of the image. So it's not necessarily erasing anything, it's just hiding it, it's masking it. So that's what a layer mask does. For this item. If I want to start taking out some of the pieces that the remove background missed, I would have my brush tool and I'd be on black because black is hiding it. And I just go in with my brush tool and I paint over the areas that I want to erase out. So now that I have one of my items completely masked out, I can now drag it around and try to get an idea of the placement that I want for this image. Also by moving it, I can see a couple areas that I need to fix on the masking, but that's okay. Now if you link together at the top there, the sizing, you can change the sizing, play with the size, play with the movement of where you want it to go and start arranging things as you continue your image. This time because the background is much busier and it's not a blank background. The Remove Background options not going to work. I'm going to add a layer mask by clicking that icon there with a little circle in it down on the layers panel. And this creates a layer mask. And since it's all white, it is showing everything on the image. So when I want to start erasing away, again, I use the brush tool on black and I can start erasing away the pieces that I do not want to show. While you're working with your Layer Mask, you might want to turn off the other layers. You've just click on the little eyeballs on the side there. And you can start to see where there are pieces that you missed. It can be easier if you fill an empty layer with a super bright color that will help show up any little spots that you're missing that you maybe want to take care of with your layer mask. You don't keep this crazy blue layer or whatever color it is. It's just there to help you see what's happening. Here. I've gone into Filter, Neural Filters. In here there is Smart Portrait, so I'm going to click this on. And it will give us different options here. And if I just tweak the I direction by even one, it will basically create brand new eyes and try to make it look good. So sometimes this is a quick fix, but it doesn't always work. And with other programs, like say e.g. when I'm doing this with Procreate, I don't have that option. So i'll I'll show you also what else I would do if I don't have the option to use this neural filter. My image, which is good because it didn't do a super good job with this. Let's up it a little bit. She looks a little one eyes forward when I was kinda still to the side, but let's see, I still didn't do much. Okay, so we're gonna cancel that. And I find that most of the time when I'm working with midtone images, one eye is better than the other. So sometimes what I like to do is I will go to the last sue, click on the image that I'm working on, make sure I'm on the actual image and not the mask. I will select, the better I will Control C copy, control V paste. And now I can move that copy over here and Control T for transform and start changing the size. I can flip it. I can do whatever I need to do to make that I match a little bit more and enjoy her face. So let's see that I liked it like that. Now I can add another layer mask to this eyeball and start blending it in. And there you can see that now I have two eyeballs that looked a little bit more similar. If I really like how that looks and I'm satisfied and I don't need to make any changes. I can merge this layer down onto the layer of her face just to keep my layers a little bit more clean and tidy, but that's a preference. Okay. So looking at her head, we fix we have fixed the one issue of her strange eyeball, and now we still have a couple other issues to look at, which is the top of her head has been cut off, a piece of hair. And then the issue of I did not mask out the entire bottom of her hair. So let's start with the top of the head and the hair. Now looking at this, I still have my mask here. And let's just pretend that I'm super happy with my mask. I don't need to make any adjustments. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to apply a layer mask. Now the reason why I'm doing this is just so that when I move on to the next step of filling in her head, I don't have to remember where the layer mask is or isn't. Because maybe I'm cloning something, but the layer mask is been colored there and it's hiding it. This way. I'll know that it's actually really Philly actually filling in properly there and that I'm not having any issues. As well as now I will have the option of masking anything that I clone stamp into this layer. For this particular image, there's different options you can go with here. But for this particular image and these particular areas, I'm going to be using the clone stamp tool. It gives me a lot of control. And I'm basically just going to clone, stamp the area out and taper it a little bit nicer so it doesn't look so chopped off. Okay, so now that I've added a bit of length to that piece, this is where I can now add a fresh layer mask and go with my black brush and give it a better shape because it's still does kinda just look like a chunk. I don't super love how straight this has turned out. So something else that I can do is I can add this layer mask. I'm just going to select this specific area. Then I'm going to go into Free Transform. And I'm going to click this little icon up here for warping options. And now I can just grab one of these points. Drag it a little bit to give it more movement rather than just a chunky piece of hair. They don't want to move it too much because the edges will start to separate. But I will purposely leave this separated and show you how to fix that if that happens. So this is looking like a little bit more natural of a wave, right? Okay, Let's say yes. Now we de-select that. Oops, I've got this weird piece missing. I'm going to again use the layer or the last sue tool. Select this area as closely as I can, making sure that I'm on the correct layer. I'm going to right-click within the area fill. And I'm going to fill with content aware. And that will usually do a pretty good job of just kinda connecting the dots. It's a little skewed here. But on the whole, I can fix that with clone stamping and stuff. But on the whole of things, once this image is done, this tiny little piece of hair is going to be completely on noticeable, especially given the texture of the regular hair. It's fine. We zoom out. Now this piece of hair is more of a flow rather than a straight trunk. Now I want to rebuild the top of her head. Before I do that, I'm not actually crazy about this hair piece that she has. So I'm going to take that out before I rebuild the curvature of her head. And to do that, we can do the exact same thing as we did with the blue line. We can select it and we can Content Aware Fill. I love doing that when it's larger piece or it's a piece that needs lots of lining up like this did. If it was a small piece, something like clone stamp, or even if it was just one line, the Healing Brush Tool could also do the same thing. So it kinda messed up. I maybe I didn't catch it when I did it. It's got a little corner here. I can use multiple things. Again, the healing brush tool, the clone stamp tool, and this is the Patch Tool. I'm going to use it this time. If I'm trying to preserve texture like there's texture in this hair, I might use the Patch Tool over something like the Healing Brush tool, which I find creates a softer results. So now we've gotten rid of her hair piece and we can start filling this in. And I'm going to just do that with the clone stamp because it's kinda like drawing with the texture and color of your image. So I'm just going to draw in a curved area. We already got a little bit of curved area when we did the clones, are the Content Aware. Now this edge is not as harsh or as strong as the other edges. So I'm going to up the hardness a little bit and just kinda go over the edge again to make it a little bit cleaner of a edge. And that's looking more natural. Now you're wondering about the bottom here. Now this is only going to work because her hair is so dark. If I had rendered this exact woman with this color background and she had silver hair e.g. or blonde hair e.g. what I'm about to do right now will not work. And essentially I'm going to be using a blend layer. Let's get rid of these and bring up this. Our background layer is pretty dark. It's darker than this paper color here, but it's not totally as dark as her hair. So if we create a copy of this section by last suing that area, control C, control V. Let's turn this woman off for a second. Now with this layer, we can set it to darken. And as soon as we hit darken, you can tell that it's not perfect, but it's pretty close. It will only darken the hair areas and we can't see where the lightened areas are. So I'll do that again, Normal darken. So instead of having one layer of this woman, I'm actually going to combine this bottom half with the top half of her. If I line this up properly. We've lined it up properly. And now we create a clipping mask for this. And we start to erase out the white areas where the, I don't know, creamy paper color. With our mask. We should only start to see this showing up. Now, like I said, this is only working because I chose a ferry with dark hair. Don't go too far and make sure that you have that as well. So now I have her on two layers. We're going to want to link these layers so that when we move her, the hair doesn't get separated from the body. E.g. we want these to stay together. So I'm going to click on the layer, shift, click on that one. So now I've selected both of these, right-click. And I want to, we can either link layer. Yeah, let's link layers. I was going to create a separate group, but that's not necessary. We can just link them. And now these will act as one layer wherever they go, even if you want to control T, transform them. We have our woman with her more faded hair. So it's not perfect. Let's zoom in and take a look. Especially depending on where she is in the image. Because the trees are darker than the hair, so it starts to look like that. However, we will leave that for now and fix it if it becomes an issue in the future. When we look at this, ideally, her head is going to be on her body. So let's flip this image to face the head. And we're going to shrink it down. And as long as the hair is darker than the dress should blend. Okay. So that actually fits pretty good together. You would never know that that had was not originally part of the body aside from maybe the skin color on the hands, but we can fix that later. So I'm gonna leave that the way that it is and move on to something else. Now, I've layer mask all of my elements and now I'm ready to start arranging them. As you can tell, I've already put together my fairy. She has her wings, she's holding her sword. Her head is on her body. She's looking pretty good. And I've got the throne in the background on the thrones way too big. So we're going to Control T and transform thrown size. So we just want it to look like something that she can sit on properly. I did want it over in this background area. Kind of wanted it to look like it fits. Okay, she's covering it. So what I can do now is instead of just linking the head and the body, I can link her with her wings and her sword and everything and move her as one piece. So let's see, this is our sword. That's her bottom hair. It's her head dress. And the wind pieces. I did a similar thing with the wings to get a darker tail on them. So I'm going to click and select all of these pieces. And then I'm going to link layers. And this is our ferry. So now we can move her as one piece. I can hover over here walking towards say, her throne. Or I can hover on the other side. This is where I can play with composition a little bit, or even decide if maybe there's something else I want to add, like looking at this the way that it is, I'm thinking it might be cool to maybe create a Fairey Prints and have him standing on the other side, e.g. or anything else that comes to mind. But right now, I'm just going to decide on a composition for these elements. And I really do like the throne in the middle. I want this path to look like it's coming up to the throne. So we're going to leave that there. And now we're going to decide where we want to put her. Also, I can flip her. So let's go ahead and flip her facing the other way and see if we like that as well. Looks like she's maybe walking away from her throne. Her sword, kind of just standing nearby. I kinda like this. Another thing that I like to add to these images is I like to have an animal companion. So that might be another item that I have over there. If I felt like I wanted to add more things, I could also add more trees or mushrooms or details into the setting as well. But for this, I'm not going to go back into MIT journey. We're just going to keep it as is. And now we have our assembly complete. However, we're not completely done. Taking a look at these images, we're going to zoom in. Now the first thing I want to do actually is fixed her sword. Because their sword is just kind of. Sitting right on top of our hands. And what I want it to look like, if we close eyes on this sword, there we go. This hand is a little weird. This one does look like it's gripping something. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to mask the sword so that it's still lays over top of this hand. But it looks like she's holding it with that hand. That is a little fix that we are going to do. I'm just going to erase it away so I can see the hand and then fill it back into the little lines. It looks good. Okay, so now she's holding this word rather than just having it float there. I like her being clear and sharp. This throne is supposed to be a little bit in the background, and it's much more clear than the actual settings. So I'm going to actually blurred this, just a touch. I forgot to go in and erase this corner. So I'm gonna do that first. I'm going to take a close look at what's happening on the side here and tried to get it somewhere in-between here. Her because it's going to be mid-range in depth as far as I'm concerned in regards to this image filter, we're going to go to Blur, Gaussian Blur. And there's a slider here. So it went to 5.6, which must have been the last one that I did. And it is much too blurry. It's blurrier than the background. We don't want that, so we're going to bring that down. And we're just going to keep bringing it down until we feel like it's a little bit cleaner than the background, but not as sharp as her. So to 5.5 is looking okay. Let's try just to go with 1.5. Still feel like that was too blurry. Now what you can see happening here, and this is my bad, is you can start to see some edges pop up again. So I'm going to hit Cancel. And I'm going to apply my layer mask because what's happening is it's ignoring the layer mask and it's pulling in the edges from underneath the black. So if I apply the layer mask and now I go do my blur, we're not going to have that problem around the edges. The edges are nice and just regular blurry like the rest of the chair. So that's how you fix that. That's 2.2. Let's try. I don't know, 1.81, 0.8 is looking to me like on par with the background blurs. So actually, no, I think it's okay because it's highly detailed. 1.8. I'm happy with that. Okay. I'm pretty happy with this. The chair doesn't look super blended, so I might want to go in and add some shadow underneath here because it does look a little bit like it's just been of cut and paste. I'm going to create an empty layer. There's multiple ways you can do this, but this is just one, Just like anything I'm showing you rarely, this is just one of the ways that you could go about this. I'm going to color pick maybe one of the background bottom layers. Let's go with this dark green. I'm going to bring the opacity way down. I'm going to make sure that it's a soft brush. And I'm going to play with the blending modes. I'm going to paint it in first and then choose the blending modes that I liked the most. Let's go a little bit higher just to kinda create a shadow. But we still want to see the texture and the details in the illustration of the setting background. Because if we just haven't on, say normal, let's pull this all the way up. We just have it on normal. We all sudden have a smoothness that is not in the rest of the image. So by changing the blending mode up here to say multiply or maybe overlay, or something like that, we'll start to see more of the image underneath. Now, even though I did this in 100% brush, we can now bring the opacity down here, instead of using opacity on the brush and fading it to a more suitable range. I like to do this well, it's zoomed out so that I can get an overall look of how the shadows should look compared to the rest of the image. Now I did that quickly. I don't love the shape. So I'm going to lay your mascot and I'm going to tweak the shadows a bit. This piece kinda looks like a root that's jetting up. So that would come up in front of the shadow. Line that up nicely. So sometimes just adding a simple shadow into your illustration where you have put an element will help make it blend so much more than it just kind of randomly floating in the image. I'm happy with that her dress is long enough that if we needed a shadow for her, it will mostly just kind of be really underneath the image. So let's go like this. They're like, It's really easy when you're just using a dress, you just darken the bottom, underneath just to touch. Now the other thing that I want to do, because I've made no color adjustments or lighting adjustments at all to this image. These images are how they came out in mid journey is I wanted her to be purple. And I did the dress first. And I would say that this dress is more of a magenta color, but I actually like it more than say, the wings. But I don't love them together. So I want to tweak the wings to look more like the dress. So here's my main wing image. And if I go down here to this icon, which is like a half filled-in circle. I will get all these adjustment layer options. I'm going to go into the hue saturation. And then up here in layers, I'm going to clip that to this layer. So it's only changing the wings. If I didn't clip it, it would change everything beneath it. Then here I can just pull on this slider and get a tone that is much closer to the dress so that it doesn't blends better. There's also saturation and lightness in here. I don't typically like to use this to adjust the darkness and lightness of an image. But I don't mind using the saturation a little bit. So let's say it was too saturated and I needed to bring it down. So it came up like that for some reason. Then while I'm making my color adjustments, I can also play with this here. But because we did certain things in mid journey to get very consistent style, there probably will not be a lot of color and tone adjustments and needed because it will render it in a consistent style using the prompt that we gave it. One other thing is I feel like this throne. I did want it to be brighter and be able to stand out a little bit. But I think I might play with the tones and maybe colours of that too, just to change how this is looking. So let's add some layer adjustments to this. And I don't specifically know what I wanna do here, but I just know that I want to do something. So experiment. Oh, I forgot to clip mask that. This is what I'm talking about when you don't add a clipping mask. There we go. So now I've clicked it just to the chair. If I pull the saturation down, I actually like it less saturated. It makes it more different. The yellow backgrounds. And like I said, you can change the lightness and darkness here, but I find that it does it in a very flat way, which I don't like. So I think I'm just gonna do one kind of test on this and see if I like it in another color. I think if we have a slight I don't want it yellow like the background. If we have a slightly red tone like her dress, she kinda matches it a little bit. But red is also opposite on the color wheel of the green. So it does make it pop a little bit more even though it's faint because we've brought the saturation down. I've adjusted the saturation and the hue, but now I want to play a little bit with the lightness and darkness. We could do brightness and contrast levels, curves. It's really a preference here. I really do like to use levels because it's a sliding scale. I find it easier than the curves, which is like the kind of graph style. This is your mid tones. Again, we need to layer, layer clip it. This is your mid tones, highlights and your dark tones. So we don't want to go too dark with things because it won't match the image. You can see that the blocks in this illustration are not true, true blacks there, a flat black. So we're going to keep that kind of low. But as far as the mid tones go, we can bring those up. We just don't want to surpass anything that's already highlighted in the image. And we also don't want to get so low that it also starts affecting the blocks again, like I said. In this way, you can have a lot more control over the lightness and the darkness and the mid tones of the image. Without that flat look that I get when I use the brightness or whatever in the hue saturation layer. So I like this a little bit dark, but as you can see, it is bringing the blacks a little bit too dark. So down here, we also have the option to kinda flatten things out just to touch. And that will make it blend more with the rest of the image. It's all to the eye. There is no specific number outputs that I can tell you. It's just eyeballing it really and trying to get something that looks good with the rest of the image. So I'm gonna go with that. Even though I've darkened it up. And I also added a color, is still stands out because the color I chose is in contrast to the green dark into that. But I put it in kind of a light area so it still stands out. And I'm okay with that. Now I'm really starting to like this image. It's coming together nicely. However, I do feel like I've got too much space over here, so I am going to crop it just a touch and really using the rule of thirds here. So I want her, she's our main focus. I want her to be in a spot that's going to grab our attention. So let's go with this cropping. I like that. Now there's really nothing else that I'm wanting to change to this image in regards to the assembly of it. So one thing that I like to do to help give these images a little bit more of a consistent feel because as you can tell, they don't have the same textures. This is quite a bit smoother than say this. This has texture, but it's a little bit bigger. And in an effort to make it blend a little bit better, I like to add layers of textures to the final assembly just to give it a little bit more consistency overall, you can find different textures online. Places like pixabay.com has free images that you can use and you can type in textures. You can try to generate them. In MIT journey if you want, you can go to my gum road shop and purchase some, if you like. There's so many ways that you can get your hands on different textures. These are just ones that I've created. So I'm going to pick a watercolor texture here, and yes, they are colored. But if I D saturate it and turn it black and white in Photoshop, then I will not have any issues with color changing, but you never know you might also like the color change. So let's select all of that copy or Control a, Control C to copy it, and Control V to put it on top, Control T to transform. Let's zoom out. Let's move this guy around. Okay? And we can start playing with blending layers. So let's put it on soft light. As you can see, it just adds to the whole image. Now I haven't changed the color. So if we like this, it's kind of giving it more of a Twilight feel because it's added a lot of blue, which is interesting. If we'd like this, we can leave it or we can change this image to be black and white and just get texture. And a little bit of tone variation as far as lights and darks go. Different. Presets and the black and white thing will give you different effects as well. I usually just go for either high contrast read to get the full effect of this one. Or high contrast blue, which will usually do the opposite of what the red did, or defaults, which is keeping a neutral. So I kind of like this, it darkens it up quite a bit, but we can pull the opacity to a different percentage. And if we zoom in, now it's not gonna do much. I typically do multiple layers of different textures. And eventually we'll start to see more texture happening. But if we flip this on and off, we'll start to see it blending things a little bit more. Let's find one that has really good, strong texture. Because the watercolor, it's got some texture, but it wasn't really strong. Okay, this is an image of a canvas board that I painted. And then I've already converted it back to black and white. And if we zoom in, you can see brushstrokes and the board texture underneath. And if we want to make that even stronger, we can go into sharpen, smart, sharpen. And this gives us the ability to play with these sliding tools and decide what we want. So let's sharpen it a lot. You can go a little bit strong here because this is just going to be a see-through layer eventually on top of our image. And therefore, a little bit strong will make it more noticeable, which is what we're trying to do. So I really liked this, the sharpened it a lot. Let's try it like this. I've added are sharpened texture to our image and I'm ready to try out some different blend modes. You can see already having it on multiply, that there is lots more texture happening in here, which is applying across the entire image and adding some consistency. But I don't want it that darks. I'm really loving this. It's giving us more texture, but it's not overpowering. Now, looking at this though, I've realized that one thing I didn't fix his her hand color doesn't match her face color. So because I've left everything in layers, I can go back and fix that. So here we have her dress layer. I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer, clip it to the dress layer. And I'm going to just look at the hand. I'm not going to pay attention to anything else. And I'm trying to match this. D is more softer yellow tones of her face. This is closer. I'm also going to bring the saturation down a little bit. Not much. Doesn't have to be perfect. I think this matches closer than what it was anyways. Okay. So now I realize I've changed her whole dress color, but we're going to do the layer mask. And again, except this time instead of coloring out this whole area, we're going to click on the Layer Mask. We're going into the Properties tab, invert, and it will hide everything. And now with a white brush, we will go in and just paint the hand. And they're still looking a little bit yellow. So we can go back into our properties and bring the saturation down a little bit. I bring the lightness up on those attached. It all depends on if I like it or not. Let's zoom out, see what that looks like. It's a little too yellow. We want it a little bit more orange async. Okay. I like that. I'm happy with that. And then just fix a little bit of masking. I have to say though, zooming in on this specific thrown, I'm still not getting texture that I love. So I think I'm going to add just texture to just the throne. Here we are. I'm going to find myself a texture in my files. It's just being like a paper texture because really this is what the illustration texture is looking like. So we're going to find some paper. Nice craft paper. If we zoom in here, this looks more like an illustration, so we're going to sharpen it a little bit and make it black and white. And then we will be good to go. I've also up to the contrast of this to give it more of a punch. So we're going to control a to select the whole thing, Control-C to copy the whole thing. And now we're going to make sure that we're selected the throne layer. And we are going to paste it there. Now because there's already other clipping masks there, it will assume that we want this clip to our throne, which we do. Taking a look at this, I want to try and match it with her texture. Looks a little bit more on well, it's pretty close, a little bit on the small side, so we'll just bring it up to try and get a texture size that matches. I'm okay with that. Now what we're going to do is we're going to change the blend mode on it and it should give, just are thrown a little bit more of its own texture. See that? It's not looking as smooth as it did before. And now we're good. And again, you can change your different blend modes to find one that you like them all. We have completed our image. Now in case you did not complete your image while you were working on it, I'm going to show you how to save it in a way that keeps all of your layers, all of your progress. It's not going to flatten it down into a solid image, and that's to save it as a Photoshop file. So we're going to hit Control Shift S. And because we haven't flattened it and it isn't layers, it's going to automatically assume that we want to save it as a Photoshop image so we can title this, whatever we want, title of your image, title of your image. And then let's go WIP, work in progress. So we can save this as a work in progress. However, I am done. I'm not planning on working on this again later. So I'm going to go layer flattened image, discard hidden layers because the hidden layer is that bright blue one that I was using just to check my masking. And now I have my image complete and done. Now, while mid journey was giving us PNG images, I prefer to save my images as jpegs. And the reason for that is because I typically work with stock agencies and a lot of them only accept jpegs. There are a lot of stock agencies aren't accepting this now, but if they do in the future, then it will be in a format that is ready to go. So evil fairy queen. I'm saving it as a JPEG. I'm saving it the full max quality. And we're done. 5. Conclusion : Now that we've completed our evil fairy image, let's just for fun, hop back into discord and type in a prompt describing our image and see how close my journey can actually get. Creating what we did with pieces that it created. Imagine an illustration of a, an evil fairy queen holding an or. Let's go with dagger. Because really it didn't look too much like a storage dagger. Made out of steel. Standing in the dark in Shan did forest with a stone thrown in the middle. What else do we have? Oh, she has that dress called curdle. Curdle dress. She is wearing a purple curdle dress. Has large purple fairy wings and long black hair. Oh, we forgot in the style of Arthur Rackham. It hasn't rendered yet. But I'm pretty sure it's not gonna look anything like what we created here today. And even though each individual piece was created in mid journey, because we took the time to create the pieces individually. It was able to put more time and effort into each piece. And therefore, the quality of the image is gonna be a lot better. We also got control over things like the layout, the exact colors that we wanted to mix and match. I don't know about you guys, but I already liked to draw and paint and do photography before bed dirty ever came along. So I am used to having a lot of control over my final image. And for me that was where mid journey really let me down. Is it felt so random and the things that it was giving me, we're so far from what I had imagined in my mind. So for myself, this was the way that I could still have a lot of control over what I was creating with mint journey. So pulling up my mid Journey gallery, we can look at all of the renders that mid-June and created with the prompt. Using our description of these images are all cool in their own way. They also, they also have a few problems like mushy hands, strange faces. I liked how some of them have multiple people, but this one, you can't even really tell once you start to look at it if it is a person or not sometimes. Like I said, the process that I showed you, we'll give you a lot more control over your results. It's a lot more work, but in my opinion, it's worth it to have an image that you actually want, rather than spending a lot of time trying to tweak prompts and get my journey to read your mind essentially. Thank you so much for checking out fantasy illustration with mid journey. Don't forget to check out the documents I've provided because I've given you a list of other illustrators from the Golden Age of illustration to help you find a style that you like when prompting your fantasy illustration elements.