How to create Text to Image AI Art on Canva

1. Course Intro : Creating AI Art in Canva: Welcome. This is Text to Image creation using AI on canva before Text to Image creation, one would have to master many skills when it comes to designing on software platforms. But now that we have Text to Image creation for AI, anyone can create an idea and type it in and have their image produced for them within moments, canva is a free to use online graphic design tool. They have recently launched their AI Text to Image prompt feature. This allows for you to take your ideas and generate images based off of text prompts. In this class, I will show you how to use the AI feature on canva. And I will show you how to utilize the Text prompts in order to generate better images. You'll follow me through illustrating different projects that I have for clients. And by the end of the class, you will be able to create your own project on canva and generate AIR it from it. So if this sounds like something that you would enjoy, please follow along in the class 2. Your Class Project: Your Class Project will be to choose a project for you to create on canva using the AIR Text to Image prompt. And so the projects that you can make on canva are limitless logos, website templates, flyers, social media posts, calendars, YouTube thumbnails, so much more. I want you to think about your aesthetic. What's the vision for the aesthetic of your project? Is that light? Is it dark? Is it post-apocalyptic? Is it retro, watercolors, dreamy, conceptual, the aesthetic will really matter when Choosing the style prompts for the Text to Image features. So that's your class project. Let's begin 3. Lesson One: How to find the Text to Image AI app on canva: How to find the Text to Image prompt on canva.com to start creating graphic designs based off of the ideas in your head, right? Uh, we're gonna go to canva.com. Now, canva is a free website design tool, but you can also sign up for their membership, which gives you a lot more access to their features. But you can use the Text to Image design feature without needing to be a part of the membership, which is a really awesome thing. Okay, So you're gonna go to canva.com. You'll need to create an account with them. Again, it is a free design tool that you can sign up further membership. But you'll still need to create an account even if you're using it for free. Once you get into Canva and have an account, you'll go to the upper right-hand corner and click Create a design. You'll be able to find the different templates of a design that you would like to make. Now, if you have a very specific type of design, which I do, I'm going to be making playing cards, right? I'm going to be making Oracle card decks for my project. You can also custom your sides. So you would just scroll down to the bottom here and click Custom Size. And then you would fill in your size. Now, you can also adjust it to pixels, inches or millimeters or centimeters. I'm gonna go ahead and choose my custom design. Once you choose the design that you want, whether it is one of Canvas templates or your own custom design, canva is going to open up the Design page for you to get started. Now, you'll see on the Design page that they'll offer for you certain templates that you can utilize. And as you're creating your design, you can actually combine it. The images that you're making through the AI feature or with what Canva already has in their graphics. But in order to find the Text to Image AI feature, you'll need to scroll over to the apps. When you click the apps, you're going to possibly see it right here. It shows me Text to Image prompt feature right here at the top. Now, if you don't see it at the top, you can also scroll down and you'll see it at the bottom here where it says Popular or create something new. The purple icon is the Text to Image prompt. Now you're going to click that and it will open you up into the window that you need to start creating your ideas. So let's just walk through what is here and available to you. The top part with this little box is actually where you write your texts. You're going to write your ideas and be able to generate any sort of images. If you scroll under that, you'll see that it says styles. The styles give you options in which they can pull from. If you click here to see all, it will show you all of the styles that are currently available to Canva. But I promise you that canva is changing and updating consistently because when I first started this, they didn't have as many options, but now they have even more than before. So we are able to choose whichever style we want to create here, which is really awesome. If you go back, you'll also be able to choose a ratio. So for example, you could do a square, you can do a landscape or portrait for the image. And this does matter because even though you have dimensions for your project, how canva produces the AI image will be based off of these aspect ratios. So because I have a very specific dimension, I'm going to choose portrait to be able to match it to what I have, which are these playing oracle cards. And that is how you find the Text to Image prompt feature in Canva. And the next lesson, we're going to test and experiments on the styles so that you can get acquainted with the styles that are available on canva 4. Lesson Two: Choosing the Best AI Styles (Evaluation Experiment): We are ready to start our Text to Image prompts. We're going to test out the styles to see what aesthetics we want for our image. And I encourage you to use the Evaluation PDF for this exercise so you can rate the Styles and prepare yourself for your own design. I'm gonna go ahead and put my idea down, which is to have a horse on a horse with a microphone. And we're going to click the seat all in the Styles. And you see that there are various options. Okay, So we're gonna go through each one and see what we come up with. Okay, It's to be the same exact text prompt, but different styles like the scientific method. We're going to have a control which is the horse with a microphone. And then we're going to change it up with the variation. So we're going to first start with the photography style section. This Styles section is the most realistic out of all the styles, starting with photo, will hit create your image. And we'll see what happens here. As you can see, it takes a few moments, but just a few moments in order to get something. Now, this is really cool. We're going to go ahead and drag these images over into Canva, into the project so that we could see them very clearly. And it's really awesome that you get four images to choose from. Okay, so we have here this course. I don't see any microphone here. So that's okay. We're still going to use the same text prompt and see if we get it with the other ones. Because this is the more realistic style, it can be hard to get like a real quirky Concept like the one that I just provided. But it's also important for you to see the styles that they provide. So this is the photo style. Here's the other photo option that they gave us, which is like a horse with the sun. And then we can do this other option, which looks really realistic here. It looks like a horse in the race, horse running. This one, this one might be my favorite. Go ahead and analyze for yourself which one is your favorite out of the four options that we get with the one photo style. This one is this a really beautiful dark course? And those are our options for the photo-realistic styles. So now we're going to go ahead and add four more pages. You'll see that on canva. So simple to add more pages by clicking underneath that Project there. And we're going to try a different one. So we're gonna move over to the filmic one. You can, you can see it here. We're just going to click there and hit Create again. Here we have a really, really incredible realistic depictions, still no microphone and this one. Okay, but you see how realistic the style actually portrays itself here. Alright, we have one here with a microphone. That's kind of interesting. It kinda looks like the Horsehead is the microphone, which is an interesting take. And we're going to move to the next one, which kinda goes a horse, a little bit of a purple hairstyle, which is kind of cute here. Then here is the last one where it looks like the microphone is leaning on the horse head, which is interesting. Okay. So this is the filmic style. And we got these four images from the filmic style. So we're gonna go back into the styles. We've done photo, we've done filmic. Let's move to vibrant. I'm going to hit Create and wait to see what we get. And it's amazing how a, how fast AI works in creating, designed for you in just moment, isn't it? This one is a really vibrant as the style portrays itself. Here we have a horse with a purple background, and we have a horse with a orange background. No microphone here, but it's getting quirky. Let's watch this out. We have a horse. There's a nice beautiful depiction of the horse. All of these are really on the more realistic side arm thing. Then we have, this is the quirky as to one. We've got a almost like a person's body with the horse head. So it's really cool how AI will come up with these random depictions? And then you're really able to decide which one you want to use. Okay, So let's move on from that. We have two more in the realistic photography Styles section. So we're going to click minimalistic and then we're going to hit Create again. Now this one to me might be the most realistic so far. It just really looks like you can see how the, the hair, the horsehair just looks so realistic in the minimalistic style. This one didn't even really give us a horse that gave us a microphone. Kind of. So sometimes you're gonna get some Genki images like that. We have just a still microphone, which this is a really nice image of a microphone. If one was looking for just that, then we have a horse. Here we go, horse with a microphone. And so now we get this really as close to what I had said before, a horse with a microphone. Okay. So let's go on to what I believe is the final one, which is the neon depiction. We're going to hit Create again. And while that's happening, I like to multitask. So while it's moving, I'll go ahead and add my pages here and get ready for the Art to display itself. Now, this one, we're getting a real neon depiction as the style promises it will be. And this one was will take a horse on stage. And that was what I was thinking. I would want right. Then. We've got this weird microphone here. And then we've got a horse with a microphone. This one is close as close to it as I was thinking because it kinda looks like the horse is singing with the microphone. So I really loved that one. Then we've got a man with a microphone. So the AI was just like, forget about your prompt. Let me just give you something else here. And so you will get more random takes on that. But it's just a part of the AI process trying to figure out what you really want. We have completed all of the photography styles within this, and we can just move on now to the digital Art section. So we're going to use the same prompt because this is our little scientific experiment. We need to keep the same exact prompt and test out the styles. We're going to go to digital Art and hit playful. We're going to add our pages here, 234. These look very cartoony animated in the playful style. And again, we have a person with a microphone. Then we've got an actual horse with a microphone. Love that. This one is really cool with the, it really looks like a horse is on stage with the microphone. I'm loving that one. We've got a horse with the microphone around its neck, which is kind of cute. I really loved the cartoon style that we're getting here from the playful style. And then we have a horse with a microphone. That microphone looks kind of big like it almost doesn't look quite like a microphone, but we'll take it. Okay, let's keep it going. We're going to do retro wave and click Create again. How this retro wave is coming in with some really interesting looks. We've got a horse with almost like the microphone, looks like it's its head. Really kinda quirky. And then we've got just a regular animated photo of a horse, which I really liked, but it's not the microphone that I wanted. So that's important to consider. This one pint of looks like the horse is on stage or standing on something, right? But no real microphone here. This is just giving you the look and the idea of retro wave style looks like here. And then we've got, this looks like real high-tech animation. Retro wave. It almost looks like the microphone jack is plugged into the horse's mouth. Very interesting depiction AI. Okay, So we're gonna move on. We're going move on to the 3D option. Hit Create again. So we've got This is really interesting. The 3D, it kinda looks like a high-tech clay mold kind of look with a 3D. Also kind of like a Pixar vibe a little bit. You tell me what you think. It, it looks like. It's really about the taste of what you're looking for. Because this could be actually really useful depending on what the aesthetic is that I'm trying to go for. That kinda do like the more glossy or image versus the animated image that we had in the previous ones. So it's really just about whether it is that you're looking for. Here we have the White Horse, kind of like kind of looks like a toy horse and a lot of ways. Okay, So that's the 3D. And how that looks like. We're gonna move on to the psychedelic digital Art We're going to hit Create again and we're going to see what we get when we do that. It really does have that psychedelic affect. The horse does not look realistic. It looks way more animated in this section of the styles. So that can really depend on what you want out of your work. Do you want it to be more realistic? Or are you looking for a more animated version? And lastly, this horse face now with the prompt being with a microphone. None of these have a microphone. And I think certain styles may have difficulty and pulling up specific details because of the style itself. So that's something to keep in mind. Alright, Concept Art. This one I actually use quite often. And it creates almost like an adult out effect. Let's see what it does with this interesting prompts that we're going to hit Create. And look at this. I really loved the concept one. It's one of my go-tos personally when creating certain things because it, it works in conceptual and really creates beautiful Art and almost looks drawn. Not too realistic, but not too animated. It's my personal taste in the Art that I'm looking to create. But it doesn't have as much vibrant colors, the Concept Art as the other ones. So that's something to keep in mind. You'll see that the colors are a lot like the whole image is a little bit more shadow, more doled out colors. Here, darker colors, less contrast, but still very, very beautiful. And here we go. Also, even though this is Concept Art, and typically I can get a lot of great your texts, ideas can work really well with the Concept Art one because it's Concept Art style. But for this one that actually does not giving us the horse with the microphone prompts. So I mean, here it looks like it's doing that, but it's not giving it as clearly as it did with some of the others. So that's something to think about. Okay, we're gonna do the 3D model. And while this may feel tedious, it's just really important to go through this and understand the styles so that you're not fishing for the styles when you're really trying to work. This also is a really good example that happens with AI Art feature on canva, which is that sometimes it will take out a picture or a won't give you any pictures. This possibly could be that it is difficult for it to generate a picture because it's not sure what we want. The style itself may just not be able to supply you with a picture. Or sometimes the words that you're using could signal to the AI that it's gonna be an inappropriate picture. And so sometimes you may put an a prompt and you may not get any pictures or miss out on a couple that happened here. And it's good for you to see that because it happens often and you just got to adapt. Okay? Now none of these 3D model portray any kind of horse. So this one that didn't, this one to me failed in the depiction of what I'm looking for. And I think that if you're looking for something that's very obscure, the 3D model might be that at least for this very specific type of prompt. Alright, we're gonna go to the Gradient option. We're going to hit Create again. As we do that will prepare. Hopefully they will come up with for images for us. And they do. We're back to actually getting some horses. This one to very similar to the other ones. Very, very bright colors like the psychedelic one. The gradient and the psychedelic both have very bright colors. I'm very animated, cartoon like with the gradient that we're finding here. Okay? And it's definitely giving us two horns, but the concept of the horse on stage with the microphone is just not really being generated with these images. And you could try again. So if you were doing this and you know the style that you want with the style is not generating it before you move to another style. Because let's say you really want the more hype, bright colors, but it's just not giving it to you. Then you might change the text here. And you might say horse singing with a microphone or horse holding on prank phone. You could change it. A horse on a stage with a microphone. You could change the text here in order to see if that style will generate something better. So you're thinking about the vision in your head and you're writing it down on how you would describe it. Okay, let's move on to the dreamy one. So we've got here bright color, a little bit dreamy. And you can see the difference between the dreamy and the one before which was gradient, right? Dreamy has a little bit more fuzzy or it's a little bit like the edges are a little bit more blurred. Whereas the gradient is still very sharp in the, in the Design, but the dreamy has a little bit more of a blurred. And that's probably why they call it a dreamy or style. Okay, So we have this horse with blue hairs, kinda cute. We've got another horse, what it looks like, a sash on it, animated bright colors, but no microphone. And then lastly, a random picture of a woman with a microphone. So we got one that is almost exactly what we asked for. Will be grateful for that. Okay, we're gonna move on to retro animate one. I really love with how it is kind of like drawn in. And it's got more distinct lines in the Art. Less childlike cartoons and more like the newspaper clipping vibe. I mean, some people might disagree with me, but it's just a little bit more detailed in it. So this is the retro enemy and it has a strong retro vibe. Yeah, it looks like comic book. It looks like comic book drawings. Right? But I'm not quite seeing the microphone. This looks like the horse has something plugged into its mouth, but we're not seeing the actual microphones. So if I really loved this one, I might go back and try to redescribe a horse on the stage, horse singing into a microphone. See if I could create a better prompt for myself, because I liked this one so much. And then we have regular enemy. So we'll go ahead and get that. Oh, this is a really cute this. It looks like a kid teenager, but looks like it has a horse phase that is really interesting. Then it's kinda holding a mic. So it really is taking in the ideas. And I got to say that this one is the most unique. Probably my favorite. I mean, I know I've already chosen, chosen favorites, but this one I just love what the AI abroad, which is kinda cool. Then we've got a blue and pink course. And again, AI is creating these plugs into the mouth but not quite the mic. Then we just got a regular horse, white and pink course. Then we've got the blue horse with a pink background. Okay, so this first one is definitely a winner and a keeper to me. Okay. We have completed the digital arts section. We're gonna move on to the final section in our test to see and learn about the Styles. And this will be colored pencil, but the horse with a microphone, we're gonna go ahead and generate those images. They're really cute. This one is indescribable, like I can't really tell what it is, but that's okay. This one I love to, and I love that. It has this kind of innocence to the Art. It really looks like a kindergarten or first grade or a second grader attempted to draw horse. Again, depending on the aesthetic, like if you're making children Color books or something like that, you may like these colored pencil vibes. And then the last one here is just like outline draw of a horse. No exact depiction of our horse with a microphone on this one. But I do like the childlike nature of this style. Okay, we're gonna move on to watercolor. Realistic watercolor painting vibes. We're not getting any microphones in these, but let's just go ahead and look at how nice the images are created through watercolor. Okay, and that's really, really nice. This blue one is absolutely beautiful. If I was to choose out of the four, I think this one would be my favorite. So while you're looking at them, you can start also writing down, what styles do you think you would be using more than others? Right down and take note of what styles are your favorites. Alright, We're moving on to stained glass, which is so cool that they have this kinda goes like this painted church, cathedral kind of vibe with the stained glass. Okay? And so with more of these interesting styles, it might be harder to get the full idea. And so it really requires changing up the text, which we will cover as well, and how to really change the text up so that it gets closer to the idea that you have in your head. But these are really cool, the stained glass ones. And they could be very useful depending on what aesthetic you're trying to get. This one looks more like a cow than a horse to me but will accept it. And this one looks like a seahorse with a horse head. So very interesting indeed, as the AI is generating these designs for us. Okay, we're gonna do the final one which is ink print with our same exact prompt course with a microphone so that we can see what we got. Let's take a look here. Yeah, that's really beautiful. And the kind of looks like it's trying to create the wires maybe of a microphone, but we don't get a microphone there quite yet. And because of my prompt, the realistic ones might have really given us the more details of what we're looking for. Right? But that's okay. Then we've got just a microphone. And I really kinda do like this. It feels very classic 60s kind of vibe here. And the last one is just a horse. Okay. I hope that this will familiarize you with the styles so that you have an easier time and just jumping to what style you want to utilize that you don't have to do this, which it didn't take too much time, but it did take 75 pages to go through each one. So I hope that this will be useful for you and knowing what to choose will seem the next lesson 5. Lesson Three: Make advanced text prompts: How to make your text prompts even more creative. In this lesson, we're going to utilize other platforms to give us ideas for Text to Image prompts. We're going to go to a very well-known website called lexica. We're just going to stay right here on the homepage. This homepage has a plethora of designs and we can copy and paste some of the Text prompts or get ideas from them. Let's click on this black and white photo of an astronaut. And you'll see in the description it says literally a black and white drawing of an astronaut. There's other descriptive words like ambient and chill wave. But another term here is CG society. And what is CG society? We'll organization that has a platform for other creative digital artists. So what this tells us is that within the text prompts, we can be more descriptive. And we can use other platforms so that it actually evokes the style of those platforms. We're gonna go ahead and copy and paste this entire prompt into our Canva. So you'll see on the left-hand side it says copy prompt. You'll just click that and we'll go over to canva are going to paste that prompt into our text prompts. And we're going to keep it on no Styles. And then we're going to hit create your image. This is just going to see what canva provides for us randomly out of It's a generator app. And here we find some really nice images. They maintain the black and white which we asked for. And it actually has some interesting graphic, cartoon, comic strip lines that I'm finding here. This one I think is the most realistic out of the four that canva provides for us. Now I'm going to choose an actual style from Canva. I'm going to choose filmic with the same prompt and look, see what we get. This really just shows us how so much variety we can get from the AI Art, adding more creativity and all of that. And you'll see here that these actually aren't as realistic as I wanted them to be. And it still has a really nice coloring, the black and white. But it actually seem to be better with just using the non styles. So that's important to see that you can experiment with these and let's try a different one. I love this. This one right here. It's a spider man mixed with Batman. So I'm hopping back over to Canva. I put in that prompt and I didn't get anything. It actually gave me issues, so actually just took out the dash that was in the prompt and it started to generate photos from me. So you just want to play around with the Text prompts because some of them are going to work for you and some won't. And it might be a minor adjustment within the texts that gives you results. So with no styles as the pre-requisite here, we got these images. This one basically just looks like Spiderman, but I really love it because it has a really nice, realistic but cartoony vibe. And then this one actually felt more like a mix of Spider-Man, Batman. But I wasn't very satisfied with this. So I start to choose one of the Styles going with filmic. And this is what I got after doing that. So we are given some really nice images. One of them chops off his head, so I couldn't really use that one. But this first one I really liked and still giving more Spiderman Batman, but I still really liked it. And this goes to show that the AI prompt will give you well-known celebrity names, archetype names, superhero names. We can really use actual names to get some great images. Let's go back to lexica and look at this one right here. It's such a very specific scenario. It says an exhausted Pepe the Frog at the front lines in the army. Like what very specific scenario that it shows for us in order to get the image. So I brought it over to Canva. And I want to see if Canva will give me some similar ideas to what was on lexica. And what I've found here is that it's still not as realistic as the one that is on lexica, but it's still gave some interesting looks. We can take these ideas from other platforms, bring it to Canva, and get some really great ideas. What do we learn about making our text prompts more creative? We can actually utilize so much more information in those text prompts. We can create celebrity names and archetypes and see if the AI generator will create favorable images that look like those names and archetypes. We can also create very detailed stories or scenes and scenarios, which also helped the AI to create precision. We can also add in famous artists names. Now when I say famous artists names of very well-known illustrator or designer, Graphic Designer name and get some styles that look like that artist's style because the AI can pick up the artist's style. And then we can also use other website AI generator names 6. Lesson Four: Make AI Coloring books with Canva: In this lecture, I'm going to show you how to make coloring books using Canva AIR. You're going to need to have a subject that you want your coloring books to be. For this example, it will be robots for me. You're gonna go to the text, the image app, and you're going to write out these prompts. Welcome posed comma clean coloring book page comma, solid backgrounds, comma coloring book, line art comma. And then this is where you're going to write your subject For me. It's going to be robots. You're gonna go ahead and put that in the text prompt and you can choose your ratio. I am actually going to try out the styles. And I'm going to use the colored pencil style for this. And then we're going to click and get the images. Now these images are going to show up in color. So the first thing you wanna do is evaluate your images, see if they're useful. Now these images came out in color, so we're going to convert them to black and white. Click the image and then the upper left-hand corner, click Edit Image. Scroll down to where you see filters and click See All. Than scroll down, you'll see the two black and white filter options, grayscale or street. I chose street for this one because it darken the lines a little bit and that was my results. So I wasn't completely satisfied. I decided to try and generalize the style, so I took it off the color pencil and put it on none. And then I regenerated the images with the same text prompt. And this is what I got. These images were way more contrast to me. They had a lot more fillers, which I think are really good for coloring books. So the colored pencil one gives you more simplified look. Whereas the null styles choosing No Styles gave you actually more of these enriched thick lines. Kids can color in. So I went ahead and click them all. And I filled them into the page dimensions. And I think that they actually make a really good general coloring book ideas for this robot theme that I was going for. So that is how you can experiment with your own ideas to make children coloring books