Blending the Unreal into the Real in Midjourney
I loved how Midjourney could create novel objects that combined features from two photo-like images (see “Rice Terrace Ziggurat” here). And then it proved itself able to allude to a hidden reality by blending a psychedelic illustration into a realistic photo (see “Australian Public Education” here). The logical next step was to try and do both in one image. I wanted a photo-like image of something from real-life, melded into a psychedelic illustration of a fantasy object. For this, I decided on a supercell thunderstorm and a UFO mothership, respectively, coming together like the final product below:
pair because I figured they’d be easier for Midjourney to blend, due to three common points:
- When viewed from underneath, they both have bowl-like shapes.
- Supercell thunderstorms spawn tornadoes, and UFOs have those beams that suck you up. Both of these are cylindrical objects that are not quite solid, and project towards the ground from the lowest part of the storm / mothership.
- They can both light themselves up with electricity (or something like it).
I wanted to use infrared photography for the thunderstorm because it had worked out well for my last creation. And I became sure of my decision after reading this photographer’s blog post. So I prompted supercell_thunderstorm with a tornado, torrential rain, tussock_grass tundra plain, infrared_photography — no road, fence, trees — s 50 — style raw, (please see this post for why I put the underscores in) and selected this:
I chose this storm because of the thick cylindrical part going down, and also because of the prominent circular striations going around that. These were both suggestive of a UFO to me, so I hoped it would make the bot do a better at blending them.
For the UFO part I prompted UFO flying_saucer mothership projecting light_beam, tussock_grass tundra plain, psilocybin fractals, psychedelic, night — no forest — s 50 — style raw — ar 4:3, and also many variations of that. I tried blending a variety of UFOs generations into the thunderstorm, but I got the best results with this one:
I picked it because of the prominent light beam going down, but in hindsight there were two more factors that made this the best in the blend:
This image had a greater ratio of visible underside of the UFO : visible roof of the UFO. When I tried images that showed more of the roof, Midjourney tended to draw the UFO separately in the blend. This is only to be expected because it’s only the underside of the UFO that looks like a supercell thunderstorm.
- The underside of this UFO had a nice psychedelic pattern on it, which was something I wanted in my final blend.
I’m not going to lie, there were many dead ends and beating around the bush with this one. I only got good results by accident, when I mistakenly told Midjourney to put in a road instead of not to make one. And then I suddenly started getting many nice results. I suspect the reason was that the UFO was lighting up a line of water in the source image, and the bot was hoping for something to map that onto in the blend. Lesson learned.
Anyway, here’s the final prompt: <URL for Image of Thunderstorm> <URL for Image of UFO> supercell_thunderstorm with a tornado, torrential rain, tussock_grass tundra plain, infrared_photography:: UFO flying_saucer mothership projecting light_beam, tussock_grass tundra plain, psilocybin fractals, psychedelic, night:: forest, road, fence — s 50 — style raw — ar 4:3 (I cropped the final result back to square to make it more visually balanced)
There are many things I learned here that I’ll apply to future Midjourney projects. I hope you got something out of this post too.
