2.2 – Experimenting With Mediums, Styles, and Themes Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson offers a hands-on introduction to experimenting with Midjourney prompts using three primary elements: medium, style, and theme. These components provide quick ways to guide the AI’s output without getting bogged down in complex or overly long instructions.

Learning how to specify mediums gives you the power to generate pencil sketches, watercolor paintings, clay sculptures, and more—just by naming the medium in your prompt. Shifting to styles, you’ll see how referencing broad trends (like pop art) or even specific artists can infuse images with dramatic new looks or recognizable aesthetics. Finally, specifying a theme or overall mood (for instance, “cyberpunk” or “fairy tale”) allows you to set the tone of generated content.

This lesson is foundational for anyone who wants to create visuals that are more than just literal descriptions. Whether you’re making graphics for presentations, experimenting with personal projects, or simply exploring AI art, these techniques expand your creative toolkit. The skills practiced here set you up for deeper image refinement in later lessons, including advanced composition and lighting.

Who This Is For

If you want to quickly change the look and feel of AI-generated images or add creative depth to your prompts, this lesson is for you. It’s especially relevant for:

• Artists and illustrators seeking inspiration across styles
• Marketers and content creators building eye-catching visuals
• Educators developing visual material for lessons
• Designers prototyping ideas or experimenting with concepts
• Anyone new to Midjourney looking to move beyond basic prompts

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Experimenting with mediums, styles, and themes is an early and flexible stage in the creative process. You might use these techniques when brainstorming visual options for a project, showcasing concepts to a client, or just seeking fresh inspiration for digital art.

For example, a marketer might try a handful of styles—pencil sketch vs. pop art—when developing ad visuals. An educator could choose between watercolor or woodblock print looks for lesson illustrations. By mixing and matching prompt elements, you’ll be able to rapidly generate a variety of image options before fine-tuning them in later stages (such as adjusting composition or color).

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Using clear, purposeful prompts focused on medium, style, or theme saves time compared to trial-and-error with generic descriptions. Instead of repeatedly adjusting vague prompts (“a dog”), mentioning specific mediums (“chalk street art of a dog”) produces more varied and targeted results instantly.

In practical terms, this method helps you avoid the back-and-forth of manually revising images or trying to match a visual style after generation. For example, it’s far quicker to ask directly for “retro Disney animation style” than to alter or filter a generic cartoon image. Over time, this approach leads to higher quality outputs that require less post-generation editing, keeping creative projects moving forward efficiently.

Practice Exercise

To apply what you’ve learned, try the following:

1. Choose a familiar subject (such as “a dog” or “a city street”).
2. Write three prompts, each focusing on one of the following: a medium (“pencil sketch of ___”), a style (“pop art image of ___”), and a theme (“cyberpunk themed ___”).
3. Generate images in Midjourney with each prompt and compare the outputs.

Which visual prompt element resulted in the biggest shift from your original idea? Reflect on how changing only one piece of the prompt affected the look and feel of the results.

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds on the basics of prompt structure introduced earlier and begins your journey into customizing Midjourney’s artistic output. Before this, you learned how to form clear prompts for imagery. Next, the course will explore composition and lighting techniques—key elements in making your images more visually engaging and professional. Continue through the course to deepen your AI art skills and unlock more advanced creative options.