27 AI Art Prompt Ideas You Should Try
A great way to get started with AI art is to explore different prompts. Prompts are what you use to describe the image you want to create, and they include lots of different information; from specific artist names and art styles to referencing pop culture icons and exploring surreal landscapes.
Try using the prompts listed below, then experiment with replacing the keywords with different ideas of your own. Soon enough you will get the hang of generating unique AI art by creating your own original prompts.
AI Art Categories
AI art generators do a great job at recreating all the kinds of human art styles that we have invented over time. The examples we cover here won’t be exhaustive, of course, but we do think they offer a great place to start. To give you a broad overview, we’ve divided the prompts into the following sections:
Our examples were created with DALL-E, but you cancompare DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusionto find the ultimate AI art generator that works for you.
In the Style of a Well-Known Artist
Referencing the masters of art history is a great place to begin if you are stuck for ideas. The simplest prompt structure is to describe a subject or scene, followed by the phrase “in the style of”. As for what artist you choose to use, start with a popular historical figure and go from there.
It also works on living artists if they are particularly renowned, but this has caused a lot of problems so far, leading some artists toopt out of AI training databases. We recommend sticking to non-living artists to avoid potential copyright issues that may occur in the future.
1. Frida Kahlo
Prompt: Portrait of a girl next to a capybara, in the style of a Frida Kahlo painting.
2. Rene Magritte
Prompt: Man with a cowboy hat, in the style of Rene Magritte.
3. Tamara de Lempicka
Prompt: A woman with red hair in the style of Tamara de Lempicka.
Pop Culture
Another fun prompt to try is picking a pop culture icon as your subject. Try thinking of some of your favorite movie characters, comic heroes, or video game protagonists; then add a few key descriptors to set the scene.
4. Godzilla
Prompt: Godzilla figurine set against a miniature city, stop-motion.
5. Pikachu
Prompt: Pikachu, cinematic, digital art.
Prompt: Batman, cinematic lighting, high resolution 3D render.
7. Storm Trooper
Prompt: Storm trooper in the desert, high-detail, dramatic lighting, digital art.
Art Styles
AI art is a great place to explore different art styles. Some styles, like “Ukiyo-e” and “Oil painting”, will give your images a classic fine arts look. Using the keyword “Unreal Engine 5”, the name of a game development software, will produce modern images closer to video game concept art.
Over time, you’ll discover the art styles that you enjoy the most, and with a few extratips and tricks for creating better AI art, you can start producing great AI-generated images.
8. Still Life Watercolor
Prompt: A still life watercolor painting of a hamburger on a table, a window in the background, soft afternoon light.
9. Retro Illustration
Prompt: Retro vector illustration of a neon city skyline.
10. Ukiyo-e
Prompt: Ukiyo-e print of two women visiting a shrine.
11. Unreal Engine 5
Prompt: Cyberpunk style city street at night, unreal engine 5.
12. Oil Painting
Prompt: Oil painting of a cottage near a pond, spring time.
The portrait format is fantastic for executing simple but effective ideas. You can get creative by substituting animals for humans or describing a fictional species.
Borrowing concepts fromcreative self-portrait ideas in photographywill help broaden your prompt vocabulary. In general, learning the terminology used in different artistic mediums helps to boost the number of keywords you have in your prompt crafting toolkit.
13. Animal Portrait
Prompt: Portrait of a Siamese cat wearing a robe, Chinese watercolor painting.
14. Sci-Fi Portrait
Prompt: Portrait of a smiling cyborg woman, peaceful, digital art.
15. Human Portrait
Prompt: Victorian era portrait of an old man wearing a hat, photorealistic.
Fantasy Landscapes
Adding “fantasy” to your prompt is a fast way of generating art reminiscent of magical tales, set in medieval castles or beautiful ancient forests. We explored a few different themes around this idea, including nature, the Medieval period, and surrealism.
If you like the results, you can tryusing the outpainting feature in DALL-Eto extend the image past its borders by generating new panels that blend with the existing image.
16. Nature
Prompt: Cottage overgrown with ancient trees, high-fantasy, digital art.
17. Medieval
Prompt: Medieval German castle, surrounded by mountains, high fantasy, epic, digital art.
18. Surreal
Prompt: Snail house on top of a cliff, surreal, fantasy, digital art.
Architecture
Using AI to generate architectural art and 3D renders is rather satisfying. You can play around with world-building pixel cottages or reimagine what a famous landmark would look like in a different setting. Play around with texture, color, lighting, and materials to shape the buildings and give them added life.
19. Pixel Art
Prompt: A cabin in the woods, isometric pixel art, 64x64, digital art, forest in the background, deer in the foreground.
20. Architectural Renders
Prompt: A photorealistic rendering of an architectural modernist 3 story home, made of concrete, merging with a rocky mountain side, artificially illuminated, soft warm evening.
21. Famous Landmarks Reimagined
Prompt: A photorealistic render of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, covered in overgrown vines, low-light, evening.
Creature Creation
We can only hope that Dungeons and Dragons players around the world are testing out AI generators because they are fantastic places to put character designs to the test. Mocking up NPCs and bosses for a video game concept is another practical use for them too, especially if you lack the art skills but are nonetheless a dedicated game developer.
Prompt: Digital art fine detailed illustration of an alien reaching out a hand, floating in space.
23. H.P. Lovecraft
Prompt: A lovecraftian monster with a squid head and human body, color sketch, haunting low light, red and blue accents, rough texture.
24. Video Game Monsters
Prompt: An ugly ogre with gray-green pocked skin, inspired by Dark Souls, Unreal Engine 5 3D render, black background, disgruntled.
Patterns, Shapes, and Geometric Designs
Repeating patterns and kaleidoscopic shapes are perfect areas to explore with an AI art generator. Color choice is a fun parameter to play with here; you may try different color palettes or specify the foreground or background colors to create something striking.
25. Fractal Art
Prompt: Fractal art, spiraling, pastel color palette, digital art.
26. Ferrofluid
Prompt: Black hyper glossy ferrofluids, light pink background.
27. Generative
Prompt: Hands, generative art, large-scale repetition, 3D render, multi-colored.
Trying New AI Prompts
The art prompts above are just a few examples to help you get started creating art with AI image generators. After trying out a few prompts, you can experiment with the descriptions by replacing keywords or subjects with ideas of your own. Before long, you will build a bank of words, phrases, and ideas to help you create stunning and original AI art.
AI chatbots are great fun, but ChatGPT has practical uses, too.
I gripped my chair the entire time—and then kept thinking about it when the screen turned off.
Turn these settings on, and your iPhone will be so much better than before.
When your rival has to bail out your assistant.
Who asked for these upgrades?
Tor spoiled me forever.
