2.5 – Style References Lesson

Lesson Overview

Generating visually consistent images is a frequent challenge for creators and teams looking to build a recognizable style or world. This lesson explores how Midjourney’s style reference feature helps you influence the look and feel of your generated images by attaching the style or mood from another image. Style references let you borrow the aesthetic from any image—whether it’s one you found online, created yourself, or grabbed from a favorite source.

You’ll see why style references are valuable for storyboarding, branding, creating themed content, or collaborating with others to ensure shared visuals all fit together. Style referencing stands apart from simple image prompting or blending, since it focuses on replicating an overarching visual approach rather than recognizing specific objects from your source. You’ll also get a sense for how Midjourney simplifies the process with options like “locking” a style reference for use across multiple outputs, and varying the influence with a numeric style weight. This is relevant for anyone wanting a streamlined creative workflow where consistency and visual identity matter.

Who This Is For

If your goal is to create images with a strong, unified style or you want to explore the creative boundaries of consistent aesthetics in Midjourney, this lesson is designed for you.

• Content creators who need cohesive visual branding
• Designers producing image series for campaigns or publications
• Educators preparing classroom materials with a consistent look
• Marketers developing repeatable brand imagery
• Artists seeking to iterate on a chosen visual style
• Anyone building fictional worlds or narratives requiring visual harmony

Where This Fits in a Workflow

You’ll turn to style references once you have a particular aesthetic in mind—either one you admire, a look you developed, or a mood you wish to repeat across several outputs. It’s especially helpful when working on projects where every image should look as if it belongs to the same collection or shares a creative DNA.

For example, a marketer might upload a previous campaign image as a style reference and generate new product visuals that match it. An educator could use a screenshot of a retro cartoon to style all lesson images for a themed unit. Locking and adjusting the style reference means you can produce dozens of new images without repeating manual steps, saving time while maintaining consistency.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Before style references, you’d need to repeat the same prompt or manually adjust each new output to achieve consistent styling—often facing unpredictable results. The style reference feature in Midjourney streamlines this by letting you set, lock, and customize a reference image’s influence on all generated content going forward.

This reduces the risk of style drift, speeds up batch image creation, and enables a high-quality, repeatable outcome. For example, a designer working on a series of themed social media graphics no longer needs to adjust and re-prompt after every output; simply lock the desired reference, adjust the style weight as needed, and focus on the message. This technique saves creative time and delivers professional, visually unified results that elevate both branding and storytelling efforts.

Practice Exercise

Try refining your workflow by creating a small series of images sharing the same style:

1. Find or upload an image with a distinct style (such as a graphic novel cover, classic painting, or screenshot from a favorite film).
2. In Midjourney, set this image as a style reference, then lock it so it remains in place for all prompts.
3. Generate at least three new images with related but varied text prompts.

Reflect: Compare your outputs. How well do they match the original aesthetic? Adjust the style weight parameter up or down and notice how the results change. Which settings achieve your desired level of style consistency?

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds on earlier material covering the basics of image prompts and blends, moving into the powerful world of style references for aesthetic consistency. Upcoming lessons will expand on advanced parameters and creative techniques to further refine your control in Midjourney. Continue with the course to deepen your skills and discover new ways to direct your creative output. There’s much more to explore—each lesson brings you closer to Midjourney mastery.