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Update: If you like Craiyon, but are looking for higher quality images, check out this article: 5 best free alternatives to Midjourney for writers who need marketing or cover images.
I’ve been collecting AI-powered image generation tools for the past year and one has become my go-to over the past couple of weeks — Craiyon (formerly Dall-E Mini).
Image Generating Ai Roundup: Dall E, Craiyon & Midjourney — The Daily Typographic
Sure, it’s nowhere near as good as OpenAI’s full Dall-E 2 system, which is fully photo-realistic and jaw-droppingly amazing, But Dall-E 2 is in closed beta and you can’t have it. You can sign up for the waitlist, but I hear that there’s a million people already on it.
Craiyon currently does a bad job with faces and the images are pretty small. The company says that it’s working on improving both of those things. Personally, given how quickly AI is evolving, I expect to see rapid improvements quickly.
Will this replace artists? No, I don’t think so. It takes a lot of time to get images you like. If you have the time, you can play with the system. If you don’t have the time, hire an artist. I think this could be a great tool for artists because they can generate a lot of ideas quickly, pick the best ones, run them by the clients, then turn them into book covers or whatever they were hired to do.
Fun With Craiyon
I do expect prices for generic-style book covers to come down quickly once more artists are able to use Dall-E 2. Craiyon isn’t quite good enough — yet — for professional-level work.
However, Craiyon is easy and fun to play with and good enough for blog post illustrations. And, if you’re clever about it, a little bit more.
Craiyon is free and there are no limits. It gives you nine results for each prompt, so you can keep trying it until you get something you can use. Yes, each run takes a minute or so, so have something else you can be working on while you wait.
Useful & Fun Tool For Gms: Craiyon, Image Drawing Ai
Say, for example, I’m writing a space opera and I want a picture of a spaceship. Hit that orange pencil button to the right of the prompt box and it will generate new pictures for you.
Click on one of the smaller squares and you get the full-sized image. Not a great quality, full-sized image, but they say they’re working on it.
You can add “in the style of Pablo Picasso” or “watercolor” or “studio photography” or “scientific illustration” or “movie poster” or “cybernetic” or “plastic toy” or “epic fantasy book cover” to your prompt. Whatever art style you can think of, pretty much.
Ai Crayon Brushes
You can also add material descriptions like “cloth” or “felt” or “jewelry” or “diamond” or “balloon” or “ice sculpture.” I really liked the felt spaceships! Try “paper mache” or “origami.”
And you can add art styles like “cubist” or “expressionist” or “pointillist” or “digital art” or “steampunk art” or “line art” or “pencil drawing” or “spray-painted onto a wall” or “pixel art” or “stock photography.” Check Wikipedia for art styles for some ideas. Craiyon might not know all of them, but it will recognize the most famous ones.
Add modifiers like “award-winning art” or “trending on ArtStation” or “photorealistic” or “Unreal Engine” or “detailed” or “nature photography” or “National Geographic” to improve the quality.
Loonatics Unleashed: Craiyon Is An Ai Model That Can Draw Images From
Most of the images we got above have been closeups. But you can play with camera angles and composition prompts to get different views.
You can ask for “aerial view” or “long shot” or “portrait” or “wide-angle” or “fish-eye lens” or “extreme close-up” or “macro” or “bokeh.”
Throw in some adjectives like “dark” or “colorful” or “futuristic” or “vintage” or “abstract” or “soothing” or “foggy” or “early morning” or childish.”
Inventory Full: Art For Art's Fake
Use the worlds “inside of” or “next to” or “above” to put things together. Like, say, “cat inside of a spaceship” or “commando inside of a spaceship.”
Do you like the TV show “Rick and Morty” and want something in that style? Add “screenshot from rick and morty” to your Craiyon prompt.
Now keep in mind I’m trying to keep my prompts simple here, so you can see the effect of each one separately. But if I wanted to work with one of these images further, I’d add some of the additional modifiers that I mentioned previously.
Craiyon Ai Image Generator From Text (formerly Dall E Mini)
I like to use Canva for projects that I work on with other people, and it’s my go-to recommendation for people who are new to digital image editing.
You can easily upload your Craiyon images to Canva and use them as part of your projects. For example, you can use Craiyon images as part of website or social media graphics, for ads, and even book covers.
To make a book cover in Canva, just click on “Custom Size” — I recommend 1, 600 pixels wide by 2, 400 high for the best ebook cover proportions. Then, at the far left, click on “Templates” and search for “sci-fi book cover.” Pick one you like, then replace their image and text with your own.
Craiyon Ai Generated Art Of Some Classic Cards In Different Styles
I wouldn’t use any of these covers for a commercial book, but, since they only took me a few minutes to make, I’d have no problem using them as temporary covers for works-in-progress, or covers for free or 99-cent short stories.
According to US Copyright office, AI art can’t be copyrighted, so someone else could, in theory, steal the particular image you’re using. The combined cover, however, is its own separate composition and you are the owner of it. According to Craiyon’s terms of service, you are allowed to use these images for free if you make less than $1 million a year in revenues, including commercially. But if you use the images to create NFTs, or if you have more than $1 million in annual revenues you’ll need to fork over some money. It’s not clear how Craiyon can enforce this, since AI art can’t be copyrighted.
And check out the Craiyon forums for some fun examples of what people are doing with the app, or the #craiyon hashtag on Twitter or on Facebook or on Instagram.
Craiyon: Ai Image Generator — Moped Army
Then, watch Maria show Craiyon — and a few other AI art generators — to artists Andrea Goyan and EE King in the video below:
Editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email her at [email protected] . She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.
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Craiyon: A Mini Version Of Dall E That Creates Images From Complex Descriptions • Mezha.media
Finding the right prompt strategies, however, can take time—time you may not have given it can take up to three minutes for Craiyon to generate an image. Thankfully, in the weeks since the project went viral, users have started to figure out what makes this entertaining little program tick, and there are plenty of tips available now that we didn’t have earlier this month.
One of the easiest ways to get Craiyon to do what you want is to ask it to generate an image in the style of a specific artist or art style. Maybe you want “Jar Jar Binks in the style of Andy Warhol, ” “Elmo by Edvard Munch, ” “
These prompts are typically successful, though occasionally the AI will simply recreate a well-known painting by whatever artist or style you’ve plugged into the text box. The Elmo prompt, for example, mostly placed the red muppet in Munch’s most famous painting,
The Difference Between Dall E 2 And Dall E Mini (craiyon)
, ” “George Washington Funko Pop” are representative prompts in this category. Users have also had success asking Craiyon to generate images that look like they were captured by security cameras, courtroom sketch artists, or trail cameras.
Because the prompt construction is a little more varied here, you’ll have to be aware of words’ alternate meanings to get the desired result. For example, “Blastoise on Judge Judy” did not turn into screenshots of the cannon-wielding Pokemon appearing on the courtroom reality show; instead we got images of the big blue turtle in front of a background that vaguely looked like a judge’s bench, or literally sitting on a horrifying wraith vaguely resembling Judge Judy Sheindlin. But hey, maybe that’s what you want.
We’ll also note that combining different styles didn’t seem to work well. One
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