Introduction: Making Art in 60 Seconds With AI: a Short Tutorial for DiffusionBee

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About: "More of a guideline than a rule".🍄 🤖 🏠

Creating art is becoming a collaborative effort because of the popularity and growing power of AI-based art creation services. With them, you can start with a phrase describing the picture that you want to make, and these systems can draw it for you!

Until recently, these tools were expensive/invite only, and often difficult to use. This tutorial will show you how to use a new Mac application called DiffusionBee to help you make AI generated art.

Supplies

You'll need an Apple Mac, preferably a newer model with the M1 or M2 chip in it. To use DiffusionBee properly, you'll need at least 8 GB of RAM to start playing around.

That's it!

Step 1: Getting Started With DiffusionBee

To get DiffusionBee, go to https://diffusionbee.com/ and click on the Download for macOS button.

You'll be offered a few different versions of the DiffusionBee app. If you have a newer MacBook, I'd recommend the MacOS - Apple Silicon - HQ Version. It's definitely slower than the other apps, but it supports a much higher resolution output.

Install the application that you selected, and we're ready to go!

Step 2: Your First AI Generated Art

The first time that you use DiffusionBee, the system may take a few minutes to initialize the model, i.e., the process that the AI is using to build art. Once that's complete you'll get a simple page with an area for a text prompt.

Start by entering the text "painting of a fantasy magic mushroom landscape at night". Next, click on the Style button to select the drawing style and the visual style that the AI will use to generate the art.

note that the styles that you select are added after the prompt text. You can add styles by entering their name after a comma.

Click the Generate button to generate the art.

Voila! The next step will go a little further in making more interesting generated art.

Step 3: A Little Deeper...

Here's another mushroom-oriented picture generated by ai with a more complex set of instructions.

For the next step copy and paste the new text prompt in DiffusionBee:

concept art painting of a fantasy magic mushroom landscape at night, with glowing blue lights, glowing blue mushrooms, dark purple sky, realistic, detailed, cel shaded, in the style of makoto shinkai and greg rutkowski and albert bierstadt and james gurney

Now, let's change the settings using the Options button, then click on Generate to create this art work.

The new version is much more detailed and nuanced. Background has depth and the ground has grass instead of gradients.

If you want to compare your results, you can go to my account at ArtHub.AI. Both versions are displayed there, along with settings and text prompts.

Step 4: Next Steps

Now that you've generated your first artworks, go to ArtHub.AI and check out art that other people are generating. People are using AI generated art to supplement and augment existing art work, and new uses are being discovered every day.

I hope you enjoyed this short introduction to AI generated artwork. There are many options to explore next, but I'd suggest that you stick with DiffusionBee for a little while, until you understand the basic features. The ability to use Inpainting and Outpainting to update specific sections of an image dramatically improves your ability to get closer to what you want.

This is the beginning of a much bigger evolution of AI as a partner to humans in making things. Enjoy!