CREATIVE GENERATIVE AI
Explore art styles for AI prompts.
Surrealism, Cubism, Impressionism — find out how to create images in these and other art styles with generative AI.
What are art styles?
From prehistoric cave paintings to postmodern pixel art, every age has produced distinct artistic styles. These styles often arise in reaction to the trends that precede them. Impressionism, for example, came about in opposition to the Realism of the late 19th century, which itself was a reaction to the Romanticism that came before it.
Historically, painters and sculptors were trained in the popular styles of their time, but with AI art generators anyone can create art in any style from any era.
Why add art styles to your AI prompts.
To get good results generating images with AI, it helps to have some understanding of how AI art works. AI art generators use neural networks or extremely complex mathematical systems, to find patterns in huge datasets. These networks are trained on hundreds of millions of images so they can turn nearly anything you type in a prompt field into a picture.
The training of these models includes art in various styles, so you can use art style prompts for the AI to work with. Instead of writing specifically about each characteristic of the style you want to use, you can save time and effort by specifying the artistic movement you want to apply to your prompt.
Prompt: (left) 80’s retro robot dancing in a busy club, lots of people, abstract ; (right) retro robot dancing in a busy club, lots of people, psychedelic anime
Let’s say you want to generate an Art Deco-inspired image for a party celebrating 100 years of The Great Gatsby. You could type “a man in a tuxedo standing in front of a cocktail bar” in the prompt field in the Firefly Text to Image Module and get good results. But if you add “Art Deco style” to your prompt, you’ll get even better results that more accurately capture that 1920s look.
In Firefly, you don’t even need to type “Art Deco style.” You can select Art Deco in the Effects section of the control panel on the right and Firefly will use its knowledge of the characteristics of the Art Deco movement to generate images that match that Roaring Twenties aesthetic.
If the Art Deco effect doesn’t quite work with your vision, it’s just one of more than 25 art movements available in the control panel. In just a few minutes, you can explore several different art styles. In this case, a Modernist or Cubist effect may work even better.
Prompt: a man in a tuxedo standing in front of a cocktail bar, art deco style
Popular art styles you can try in Firefly.
Whatever the subject matter or look you want to create, you can experiment with different art movements in the Effects section of the Firefly control panel. Here are just a few examples of popular art style ideas applied to the prompt “Animal dance party.”
Bauhaus
Founded in Germany in the 1910s, the Bauhaus movement was dedicated to the principle that modern design should be simple, functional and easily reproduced for the masses. Use Bauhaus to create images with geometric shapes and simple lines.
Impressionism
Starting in France in the mid-19th century, Impressionist painters tried to capture fleeting moments in time. Their subjects tended to be everyday people and places and instead of portraying them realistically, they used visible brushstrokes and bold, unmixed colours to capture light and convey a sense of spontaneity. Try this style to evoke that same feeling of action in a specific moment.
Cubism
Made famous by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 1900s, the Cubist style breaks elements down to their geometric shapes and attempts to capture subjects from all angles. That’s why, in many of Picasso’s works, the subject has uneven eyes and two noses, one in profile and one in a three-quarter view. Selecting the Cubism style automatically generates images full of geometric shapes and angles.
Psychedelic
Psychedelic art tends to blend vibrant colours and intricately swirling patterns to create distorted, surreal images. (Think of concert posters from the late 1960s.) The Psychedelic style ensures that, whatever your prompt, the results are dreamy and unexpected.
Steampunk
Steampunk art comes out of steampunk genre of science fiction, in which 19th-century Victorian style and steam engine technology meet science fiction and fantasy. The Steampunk effect will dress your subjects in old-fashioned clothes (occasionally with goggles) and generate beautiful, complicated-looking machines.
Surrealism
Beginning in the 1920s, the Surrealists tried to capture the unconscious mind and dreams as a way of more fully capturing the whole of human experience. This style works well for dream descriptions or depictions of life’s weirder moments.
Synthwave
Synthwave is an electronic music genre from the early 2000s, but it’s also a visual style that evokes 1980s action and sci-fi TV shows. Characterised by bright pinks, purples and teals, this is like adding a dash of 1980s Miami to your prompt.
How to add art styles to your prompts in Firefly.
You can start by turning your idea into a text prompt. (If you need more pointers, check out these steps to make AI generated art.) Then add the name of the art style you want to use directly into the prompt field. If you’re not sure which style might work with your idea, you can follow the steps below to try a few different art movements from the control panel.
- Open Firefly.
Go to the Text to Image module in Firefly. - Find the control panel.
Click one of the sample images to open the control panel. - Browse Movements.
In the Effects section of the control panel, click Movements. Scroll down the list and click the artistic movement you’d like to use. - Add your prompt.
Type your prompt in the prompt field. (Get more tips on how to write effective prompts.) - Generate.
Click Generate and check out the results. - Refine.
Change or add to your prompt, try a different movement or add more direction by choosing from the Colour and Tone, Lighting and Composition menus. You can also try negative prompts to exclude elements from the results.
Give even more style guidance to Firefly with Generative Match.
Match the style of a specific image by adding a reference image to Firefly. You can upload your own image or apply a style reference from the curated gallery in the control panel. Choose reference images based on texture, medium, style, lighting and more.
Edit part of an image with Generative Fill.
Sometimes an image comes out nearly perfect but for one or two areas. To touch up those areas, open the Generative Fill workspace by clicking the Edit button on the top left of your generated image. Then you can subtract elements you don’t want or add new elements using text prompts to add elements or subtract them.
Prompt: husky dog dj with sunglasses tongue out with paw on spinner, long-time exposure, digital art
With all the tools available in Firefly, getting the images you want out of generative AI is just a matter of experimentation and iteration. Keep trying new prompts and exploring different art styles and don’t forget to add your own style ideas. With your own creativity pushing this technology in new and surprising directions, you’re sure to generate amazing images.
Questions? We have answers.
Different styles work for different prompts, so consider the look you want to achieve. If you’re not sure, try exploring a few different styles and see which one you like best. It might help to create a mood board of images that inspire you and use those to guide you in your prompts.
Experiment with subject matter and style. Go for traditional, like “watercolour of sailboats” or “Japanese woodblock of Mount Fuji with a farmer in the foreground.” But you can also mix up style and subject matter, like “watercolour of a heavy metal concert” or “Japanese woodblock of cars sitting on a motorway in rush-hour traffic.” Give the AI more parameters to work with by adding a more detailed description of the scene you imagine. Then try the scene in a few different styles to get a sense of how it looks. An Art Nouveau depiction of a “teddy bear’s picnic,” for example, is going to be wildly different from a Neo-expressionist version.
As a type of generative AI technology, AI art generators work similarly to other types of artificial intelligence, which use a machine learning model and large datasets to be able to produce a specific type of result. With generative AI, anybody can use everyday language and other inputs to produce images, videos, documents, digital experiences and more. Adobe Firefly is being built into Creative Cloud to give people the tools to both generate results quickly and customise them to fit their unique vision.
