At the same time, throwing more words at Midjourney won’t always give you better results, and may in fact cause it to focus on less important details. Don’t say “big, large, huge”; just say “gigantic” and trust that AI will understand. You can always try a prompt again if it misses something.
Watercolor Portrait Painting Tutorial – Painting with Watercolors for Beginners
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I love working with watercolor paints and learning more about painting in watercolors. This watercolor portrait tutorial, will help to show how to approach painting with watercolors for beginners. Even if one does not have much experience painting with watercolors – knowledge from other painting mediums can be applied to it.
The wonderful thing about painting is, that once you learn the fundamentals of painting. You can apply them to every medium you work in. So, even though oil painting is my primary medium. I can work in other mediums because I know and understand the basic fundamentals of painting.
What you will discover in this watercolor portrait painting tutorial
In this watercolor portrait tutorial I placed an emphasis on value because value is the most important element in painting. I started the portrait out (based on a figure from a Vermeer painting) in a monochromatic way by using one color to start out with.
Painting in watercolors and watercolor portraits work best, when approaching them in a very simplified manner. Don’t get too carried away by mixing a ton of different colors – especially in the beginning!
Just using one color to start the painting out makes it much easier to create a clear value structure. Once color gets brought in, being able to see value clearly becomes a little more difficult when painting with watercolors.
First look for the value shapes of your watercolor portrait painting
Like I said earlier, value is the most important aspect to painting. The same holds true and is important to realize, when it comes to painting with watercolors for beginners. Here I looked for the whole shadow shape that appeared on the right side of the face. I used only one color and one value tone to lay down a shadow shape for the watercolor portrait.
For the color I mixed together alizarin crimson with pthalo green to get the muted red color in the above example.
Sign up for Discord
Discord is a chat app, similar in some ways to Slack, though it was originally designed for gamers trying to coordinate tactics while playing multiplayer online games like League of Legends and World of Warcraft. It’s incredibly popular with gaming groups and other arts and hobby communities. There is a reason that Midjourney uses Discord—even if it seems a little convoluted from the outside.
All that said, before you can even use Midjourney, you need to sign up for a Discord account. It’s free, so head to Discord’s site and register a new account if you don’t already have one.
Sign up for Midjourney
Once you’ve got a Discord account, head to the Midjourney website, and click Join the Beta. This will open an invite to join the Midjourney Discord channel. Click Accept Invite, and you’re in.
Note: In late March 2023, Midjourney suspended free trials due to people abusing the system, though they’ve brought them back for limited periods to mark the release of new versions. The developers have stated that they intend to bring them back fully at some point, but there’s currently no ETA. Previously, the free trial offered roughly 25 free images (it was limited to 0.4 hours of GPU time) under a CC BY-NC 4.0 Creative Commons non-commercial license. When free trials return (or if they already have by the time you’re reading this), you’ll be able to skip the following step—at least until you burn through your free images.
To subscribe to a Midjourney plan, head to one of the newcomer rooms (called things like #newbies-14 and #newbies-44).
Type /subscribe in the message field, and hit enter or return. This is what’s called a slash command, and it’s how you interact with Discord bots like Midjourney. You’re just telling Midjourney that you want to subscribe.
This will open a link that prompts you to sign up for a paid Midjourney plan.
They start at $10/month for the Basic Plan with ~200 image generations per month and go up to $120/month for the Mega plan, which gives you something like ~3,600 AI-generated images quickly and unlimited image generations if you’re prepared to wait a bit longer.
Once you’ve signed up, head back to Discord. It’s time to get started.
Generate your first image
Midjourney is designed to be used by a community of artists (which is why it runs on Discord), but the #newbies channels can be pretty chaotic. There are a lot of people constantly posting prompts and requests. (Scrolling through the different channels is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t.)
If you’re a paid user, you can send commands to the Midjourney Discord bot via direct messages. By default, they’ll still be publicly visible in the members gallery; if you want to create private images, you need to subscribe to the more expensive Pro or Mega plans.
For now, let’s keep working in a #newbies channel. But if you’ve signed up for a paid plan and want a calmer space to work, click the Midjourney Bot, and send it a direct message.
Enter /imagine in the message box, and then type a text prompt, and press Enter or return. You can type in whatever you want, but if you need some inspiration to get started, here are a few to try:
- A Canadian man riding a moose through a maple forest, impressionist painting.
- A Vermeer painting showing an Irish wolfhound enjoying a pint in a traditional Irish bar.
- A hyper-realistic render of a mermaid swimming through a green kelp forest surrounded by fish.
Wait a minute or so, and you’ll have four variations of your prompt.
If your experience with Midjourney is anything like mine, at least one of them will be excellent.
