Part 5: Using other people's art

Prompting with tutorials

Prompts:

• Flow fields

• Watercolours
  
  

Another great way to work with other artists' knowledge is to use a tutorial or a walkthrough that they've written. I've discovered that I can adapt tutorials into prompts in at least two ways: with an entire tutorial prompted in one go, or by prompting iteratively with bits and pieces.

Prompting with whole tutorials

I used a Tyler Hobbs tutorial on simulating flow fields to create this art generator with a single prompt. It was incredible to have it work that quickly; I didn't even read the tutorial thoroughly and only skimmed it briefly myself.

To accomplish this feat, I used a document-style approach. I simply asked Claude to make a piece inspired by flow fields, wrote "if you wish you can draw inspiration from this tutorial and freestyle to your choosing. Be artistic!" and then copied and pasted the entire tutorial into the prompt verbatim. Normally, I'd use XML tags to delineate the beginning and end of the copied content, but I didn't even do that here. Before I submitted my prompt, I combed through Tyler's tutorial, removed all of the images (since Claude can't recognize them when they're submitted as part of a written prompt) and replaced them with placeholder text like [IMAGE] and [IMAGE: description] where Tyler provided a caption. I figured that if it were important, Claude could just confabulate the images. And that was enough! Websim user Massv made a variation on this generator which updates the colours and flows in real time as the options are played with.

As my next move, I asked Claude to "create controls to adjust the art in interesting ways," which elicited this wonderful variation.

I also asked Claude to make this design into a sphere, which produced a black-and-white rotating globe that contains shimmering stars that dance as the globe spins. I’ve asked Claude to make patterns into spheres before, but up until this point, the designs were more flat and simple (see, for example, my Magic Eye Egrs). It seems clear to me that the 3-dimensional complexity of this output is a natural progression of the work that it was built upon.

Prompting iteratively with tutorials

As another experiment, I used a Tyler Hobbs tutorial on making watercolour brushes, to try and generate a similar effect on my own. This time, I started with a version of my Sublime Blossom generator, which I had Claude make into a dragon scaled flower of power.