How I made 27,000 Archetype masks in Midjourney

I spent nearly a year generating masks in Midjourney.

I started my whole mask generation journey by brainstorming as many different archetypal masks as I could think of. I used the Elgato Streamdeck to program some reusable prompts so that I could just press a button and enter the prompt.

I tried as many different combinations of archetypal characters, animals, materials, art styles, and themes as I could come up with.

I really got to know each version of the Midjourney algorithm and noticed how it responded to the different prompts. Some versions were very literal and required a lot of extra descriptions and modifier keywords to get the right thing. Others would create weird borders, yet others would add text and garbled watermarks. Some versions were very artistic and almost looked painted, later versions became a lot more realistic. With Midjourney version 4, all it wanted to do was create COVID masks, so I had to come up with a bunch of new prompts to coax it away from surgicals and n95s.

Euvie came up with a bunch of ideas too, things I would not have thought of myself – especially characters from Slavic mythology, as well as different moods and materials.

After the first 5000 masks or so, I started to run out of ideas.

Fortunately, around that time ChatGPT came out, and I was able to get it to come up with new ideas by asking it to mix rare materials with archetypal characters. Each time Midjourney would come out with a new version, I would go back and redo some of my favorite prompts from before, in the new version.

Kind of late in the game when I was really starting to get desperate for ideas, I realized that I could prompt Midjourney to come up with different SciFi and otherworldly materials and textures, and then use those images as prompts to generate even more masks.

Looking back, it’s interesting how my approach evolved together with the AI. 

It really was a collaboration.