Simple Text Portraits

This is a simple prompt technique that works across the board for many platforms, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E2 , and more.

John Iovine
3 min readSep 30, 2022

--

John, the Dentist

Did you know you can create a reasonable portrait just using a name?

Well, it’s true. Recently, I read this article by Stella Sky

https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/what-is-your-favorite-name-94078f85af28

She wrote about creating amazing portraits using only a first name.

In this article, I’m taking Stella’s idea a little further. We can add more sizzle to our portraits by adding a few words judicially. Placing an adjective before the name improves the results. Less is really more, as they say. We can moon-shoot our results if we add a short descriptive word after the name.

Let’s take this AI Text to Art experiment for a spin, shall we?

Maria

For each portrait name, I being with an adjective, like; alluring, weak, strong, fragile, frail, sleepy, excited, angry, peaceful meditative, muscular, swoll, etc.

alluring Maria

Pick a name and run it a few times with different adjectives.

irresistible Maria

Next, we can rework the portrait by afterward adding a description.

If we started with Alluring Maria, we could add a descriptive nouns, like nurse, car mechanical, airplane pilot, astronaut, aquanaut, race car driver, garbage women, witch, sorceress, etc.

Alluring Maria as a nurse

I want to create beautiful and artistic photos that look realistic, so I have my Midjourney rendering default setup using

--

--

John Iovine

Science writer, thinker, self-experimenter, focusing on personal development and health — www.john-iovine.com