AI-driven album art (and new releases!)
Midjourney made it easier to go from “recording” to released, taking a rough concept and really running with it!
If you’ve seen me on Medium, you’ve likely heard more about product design, design systems, and data visualization. But I have some stuff about music, too!
I’m interested in stuff like this ☝ ️from a Design perspective, but I’m also a writing musician myself! I haven’t spent much space on Medium writing about that, but with a new single out today, I thought I’d toss it in.
The new single is called “Drive-in”, with accompaniment from Molly Warner (my wife, the alto) and Min Cho (the baritone).
I hope you like it, follow it, all that. And — to pay up on my clickbait title—one of the most exciting pieces of this release is the album art, which I generated with the Midjourney art AI! I’ve written about that before, but wanted to share my rough process with this specific piece.
Making this art using Midjourney AI
- 🧠 I came up with the concept in my head, with blue lighting in a dark space — I was actually planning on doing this with photography initially, until I played around with the concept in AI.
- 📣 I started with the original prompt: three faces staring up into a blue light, facing forward, sketchy, realistic, — ar 3:2
- ♻️ I ran, re-ran, and then tweaked the prompt(s) that I fed to Midjourney, building off of images that I thought were motivating and a good fit, refining the prompts to try to generate more fitful, interesting scenes that felt real.
- 🖼 Furthermore, one of the keys to honing in on a good concept is to re-feed the image, or pieces of an image back into the AI! In this case, I photoshopped out the backgrounds and backing characters in some images to isolate a single figure I wanted to feature (who was close to the one you see in the final art).
- ⚖️ I refined down to one that I really liked, with a nice style and setting with the headrests in the back of a retro-ish vehicle. (Ostensibly sitting in a drive-in theatre, with the blue screen behind the 4th wall)
- 🖥 I took that into photoshop (actually, Affinity Photo 2) to make some tweaks: adjusting contrast/lighting/etc., moving the eyes around and tweaking colors and eliminating artifacts.
- 🅰️ I added the lettering there, too, trying a few things out (having extra text from the singer credits does add an interesting challenge)
- 🔺 Importantly: I checked this image against Google reverse image search, and against Have I Been Trained, but didn’t find any direct images that this AI art was obviously copying from. We’re in the early days of AI and really in some trepidatious territory with copywrite infrigement—and I’m in the midst of it now!—so I’m hoping that this was a suitably unique piece of art, but if an artist reaches out to me to indicate otherwise, I’ll of course comply with requests to remove and revise as needed to avoid “stealing an artists’ work.”
Next up is an EP I’m mixing: I had some old digital art I drew from it by hand, but I’m now feeding that original art into Midjourney to enhance it. I’ll post more on Medium once that EP is released.
Update: another EP with AI-assisted art
I have another release out (Began then, March ‘23), which also involved some AI assistance in crafting the EP art.
From a design perspective, this one’s almost more exciting than the “Drive-in” release we looked at above, because I actually took the prior artwork I’d designed for the original EP (by hand, no AI) …
… and then fed that into Midjourney’s AI to see some expansions of the concept:
I got plenty of styles and sources of inspirations back, chased a few concepts down for refinement, then finally picked one and touched it up — colors, background cleanup, and lettering — in Affinity Designer 2 by hand.
I see it as especially exciting because it feels less like “potential copyright infringement” (see: AI-scraped-and-generated art from scratch), and more like a rich assistant and palette extension for a human designer.
Exciting stuff!
Update (again … again!!)
I’ve made a habit of this (and I’m getting better at prompting, too). For this March 2024 release, I had a vague idea of what I wanted, but the AI — Midjourney’s latest release—added color, clash, and intensity that I didn’t anticipate (but that jives well with the song). Here it is:
More music
And, while I’m suddenly promoting my own music here 😆, I’ll call out some releases of mine from the last year:
I’m on Spotify and SoundCloud, and basically anywhere else you can find music, under the artist name “Alex Couch.” See ya there 👋.
