As Midjourney continues to roll out innovative tools for creators, the possibilities for stylizing and refining digital art keep expanding.
From consistent character designs to unique visual styles, features like Style Reference (-- sref) and Character Reference (-- cref) have already given users more control over their prompt-based images.
But for reimagining hand-drawn sketches, I still had to look to other platforms to stylize my original artwork, not anymore.
Midjourney’s new “Retexture” feature in its Edit tool finally bridges that gap allowing me to blend my original artwork with AI styling for the first time.
As a heads up, to date, the Edit tool is available only to users who have generated at least 10,000 images or are yearly subscribers or are monthly subscribers who have maintained their subscription for the past 12 months.
I started playing around with Retexture, and I wanted to share the cool video I made starting from an original charcoal sketch.
Starting with an original image
Midjourney’s new Edit tool is only available through Midjourney’s web application not on their Discord server.
Once in the Midjourney web application, the Edit tool is the fifth icon down on the lefthand navigation bar. When you click the Edit tool icon, the Retexture tool is the second tab in the top left corner.
I uploaded a charcoal sketch I drew of a woman by clicking the yellow “Edit Uploaded Image” tab.
Below is the original image I uploaded.
Next, I wrote a prompt describing the changes I wanted for the image, using -- sref codes to apply unique styles. I also fine-tuned the prompt settings through the adjustment control panel, which you can access by clicking the icon next to the ‘Submit Retexture’ button.
Here’s a sample prompt and the resulting image:
Prompt — a woman looking up in aspiration -- chaos 20 -- style raw -- sref 1717166573 --personalize bz55ayi -- stylize 300.
One could play around with retexturing all day, but I limited myself to retexturing my original sketch into ~20 different styles. Then, I selected ~15 to upscale into my gallery.
If you don’t upscale an image to your gallery, the quality will be too low to do much with it, and the images will be lost if you retexture a new image.
The next step — Make a cell animation.
Now, that I had all these retextured images, I decided to create a video of the images superimposed over each other to mimic animation.
My concept was to recreate a gallery piece that would inspire women, echoing the spirit of the original sketch.
I took all the images I retextured in Midjourney and overlaid them onto a large, blank copper canvas using Adobe Photoshop in cell animation mode.
Here is a snapshot of the process:
When I was happy with all the image layering, blending, and timing, I exported the file to render as a video.
The final step — creating a cool video.
I use many different types of video editors, but Canva is a great option to string simple video clips together and add messaging.
I took the gallery animation file I rendered in Adobe Photoshop and used Canva to add text and music.
Here is a snapshot of the process:
And here is the final video:
Final thoughts
With the continual evolution of AI image generation platforms like Midjourney, I find it grounding to keep my human-made art at the core of what I create.
Midjourney’s Retexture feature is a great way to layer in AI-styling with original art.
If you want to check out how I blended original art previously using Midjourney, read this blog post:
I am constantly exploring creative ways to blend original artwork with Midjourney’s AI tools, so I hope this mini video example helps give you ideas to make your AI creations artfully yours.
If you need help with AI design, don't forget to contact JEFS for help!
Julia Fletcher (JEFS) is founder of JEFS Storytelling Arts, a graphic design studio, where she uses her unique research skills and artistic talents to create custom visual stories that help clients’ increase engagement and promote the education of their audience.
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