I started playing with AI image generation with Midjourney. The first prompt I tested was about star ship pilots in comic book style. I liked the style it decided to see if I could generate some characters and then use them in different scenes. I rerolled the prompt to get more characters. Here are the first four characters Bea, Zack, Janet and Michelle.

Full Body Illustrations

They look more like a fighter pilots, but I can live with that for now. Midjourney appears to prefer white ladies, when nothing else has been specified in the prompt. I will add more diversity later, but the next step was to try to get full body illustrations of some of the pilots. I used the original pilot images as image prompt and described a standing character in the text prompt.

Pretty good, the style is a bit different, but she definitely has similar looks. Having multiple views of the same character is a nice side effect of trying to get a full body illustration in square aspect ratio.

Unfortunately, I did not have such good luck with Zack, Bea and Michelle. The styles were more varied for Zack and Bea, and I got younger versions of Bea. In this case the AI decided leave the sides empty instead of creating multiple panels or views of the character.

I left the style out of the prompt for Michelle and got the result in different style than the input image. I made another prompt using the image to to convert it to similar aestethics. It’s better, but not the same. The symmetric background also does not look good.

Adding Diversity

I kept rerolling and finally got a black female: Nika. At first I did not want to specify too much to allow Midjourney to devise ideas. Because I got certain stereotypes often, I tried a different approach to create another male character. Instead of rerolling until a suitable character popped out – the males were I often got Zack lookalikes – I used Michelle’s image as prompt asked for a male. Initial result was not good, but rolling variations gave a decent blonde guy: Hans.

Because I got white characters most of the time I used specific prompts to create African and Asian pilots. This appeared to also change the style a bit. I got a couple of decent pilots, for who I have not decided names yet.

Next Steps

I plan to continue experimenting and try different techniques to create consistent style and reproduce the characters in various scenes. Currently each image has a slightly different style. I want to find a prompt to produce a specific style without invoking any artist by name. I tried adding Bea and Zack to the same scene, but got poor results. Usually a single pilot who was a mix of input pilots.