Artificial Lexicon
Guide

Prompt Engineering, Properly

A prompt is a stack of decisions: what's in the frame, how it's lit, what it's made of, and where the camera sits. This guide works through each layer with examples you can steal.

Free Midjourney Stable Diffusion 12 min read

Leveraging artistic language

Words that reference art movements, techniques, and eras change the outcome of a generated image. The model has seen millions of captioned artworks. When you say ukiyo-e, you borrow every woodblock print in its training data at once.

This is why one style word beats a paragraph of adjectives. "Beautiful, detailed, intricate, stunning" tells the model nothing. Every image in its corpus got captioned that way by someone.

worked example/imagine a lighthouse keeper's cottage, ukiyo-e, woodblock print, muted indigo palette --ar 2:3

Incorporating mood and atmosphere

Mood words work on lighting and color grading more than subject. Melancholic pulls toward desaturated blues and overcast skies. Golden hour warms everything and drops the sun to eye level. Choose one mood and commit. Competing moods average out to nothing.

💡 The Lighting & Atmosphere wall has 110 of these, sorted by source, method, and style.

Specifying composition and perspective

Camera language is the most literal part of a prompt. Low-angle shot, rule of thirds, macro, isometric: the model treats these as framing instructions and obeys them more than style words. If a generation feels boring, fix the framing before adding adjectives.

worked example/imagine street food vendor at night, low-angle shot, shallow depth of field, neon rim lighting, cinematic still --ar 21:9

Adding dynamic elements

Static nouns produce static images. Verbs and weather add motion: wind-whipped, mid-leap, scattering pigeons, rain streaking the glass. One dynamic element per prompt is usually enough to make an image feel caught rather than posed.

Customizing details

Material and texture words are the most underrated layer. Verdigris bronze, worn leather, gossamer, damascened steel: these survive generation better than colors do, because a material sets color, reflectivity, and age at once. The Textures & Materials wall has 74 of them with example images.

Crafting your first prompt

Build in four moves, in this order:

  1. Base prompt: subject and setting, stated plainly.
  2. Style: one movement or medium from the styles wall.
  3. Mood: one lighting or atmosphere word.
  4. Descriptors: two or three material, composition, or motion details.
the four moves, assembled/imagine a fox crossing a frozen river (base), gouache (style), blue hour (mood), wind-whipped snow, low-angle shot (descriptors)

That's the whole method. The walls on this site exist so that steps 2–4 take a browse and a click.

A version of this guide first appeared on the old Artificial Lexicon and on Medium. Rewritten and expanded for this site.