Reproducing Vinyl Stickers

In today’s post, we’ll look at creating and recreating vinyl stickers. This is one of the things Midjourney is particularly good at that could fairly easily translate into real or existing use cases.

Services Used

Today, and probably in the future, we’re just going to look at results with Craiyon and MidJourney. When I get access to DALL-E 2, I will start including that. Starry AI may make a reappearance when we look at art reproduction or creating new artworks in an artist’s style. The other services I’m aware of perform so poorly here I will leave them out entirely.

GPT-3 was also used to generate some of the tests.

Tests

Reproduction

I found a sticker from the /r/sticker all time most popular posts to try to recreate:

{{< figure align=center src="img/image-20220723114239581.png" title="Lava Lamp Lighter Sticker" >}}

Creation

I always like the idea of trying to use GPT-3 to come up with the prompts for the Image AI services. Here, after some tinkering, I got this set of prompts for Simpon’s stickers:

Create a set of popular vinyl sticker designs with themes from the TV show The Simpsons. Use different colors, concepts, characters, and scenes for each sticker. Create a detailed physical description for each sticker. Include the sticker's concept, the sticker's physical attributes, the sticker's color scheme, and the sticker's shape in your descriptions. Be as specific as possible.

I also ran a more generic one:

Create a set of popular vinyl sticker designs with themes from different popular media franchises. Use different colors, concepts, characters, and scenes for each sticker. Create a detailed physical description for each sticker. Include the sticker's concept, the sticker's physical attributes, the sticker's color scheme, and the sticker's shape in your descriptions. Be as specific as possible.

We’ll go with these 2 today:

• Lisa Simpson: This sticker is a portrait of Lisa Simpson. She is wearing a purple dress and has her hair in a ponytail.
• A "Star Wars" sticker with a portrait of Darth Vader in the center. Darth Vader is all black with a helmet that covers his face. He has a red lightsaber in his hand. He is surrounded by a white frame with the words "Star Wars" written in black letters. The background is black. The sticker is star-shaped.

Results

Star Wars

Everyone did a bad job with long prompts from GPT-3 with lots of specifics. When they were simplified and cleaned up, they performed a lot better. Unfortunately, only Craiyon could get the shape correct and only MidJourney could make real stickers.

The Simpsons

Both services seemed to struggle with abstract or non canon ideas for characters. Instead of changing Lisa Simpson to have a pony tail (a pretty tough sounding task I think) it seems like it decides to change the character instead. MidJourney had similar issues but kept a feasible sticker art style.

Lava Lamp Lighter

Both services did a fair job at making sticker like images and designs but none matched the source image very well. Craiyon did seem to understand the concept at points.

Community Finds

Other people have had very good results. These all were generated using MiidJourney.

Final Thoughts

In another post I will do a deep dive to try to make a printable sticker based on what I see in the community results. If you’re not aware, MidJourney shares all prompts and generated images amongst the community which is great for learning and testing without having to wait around all day for images to generate.

I’ve found a few more potentially viable use cases with MidJourney that we’ll look at in other posts as well.