Part 5: Using other people's art
Prompting with tutorials
Prompts:
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.
From here, I used commands that I adapted from Tyler's tutorial, like "add controls to run rounds of recursive polygon deformation" and "add variance levels assigned to each edge in the polygon." To tell you the truth, I didn't really know what I was doing. A lot of the time, I just used the descriptions that Tyler provided for the images that he used to illustrate his steps. I suspect I missed some important instructions, but Claude still got the gist of it. I think that the texture of my watercolour wash turned out pretty nicely.
