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Your first good prompt

Five minutes, one subject, four words. This is the shortest path from a blank box to a picture you meant to make.

Free2 min read

The whole anatomy in one line

Every prompt on this site follows the same skeleton. Learn it once and every wall, guide, and tool here will make sense.

the skeleton[subject doing something], [style], [lighting], [1-2 details] --ar 3:2

The subject is yours. The style and lighting words come from the walls. The details are the two things the image would be wrong without. That is the entire theory. The rest is picking better words.

Step 1: write the subject plainly

Say what is in the picture and what it is doing. No mood words, no "beautiful", no "epic". Those come later or never.

good subjectsa lighthouse keeper reading by lamplight a street cat crossing a rainy market a greenhouse full of ferns at dawn

If you cannot name a subject, press the dice in the builder and argue with what it deals you. Disagreement is a fine way to find out what you want.

Step 2: take four words from two walls

Open the styles wall and click one word. Open the lighting wall and click one more. Style plus lighting moves an image further than any other pair. Add two details of your own.

assembleda lighthouse keeper reading by lamplight, linocut print, rim lighting, wool sweater, moths --ar 3:2

The tray at the bottom of every wall collects your clicks and copies the line out. The builder does the same thing with dice.

Step 3: paste it where it goes

Midjourney: type /imagine in Discord and paste. The tray's Midjourney toggle formats the line for you. Stable Diffusion, Nano Banana, and GPT-Image: paste the plain line, no slash, or wrap it in a sentence for the chat image models. The Midjourney and Stable Diffusion pages explain the parameters when you want them.

Step 4: change exactly one thing

The picture came back wrong somewhere. Good. Swap the style word and generate again. Keep everything else identical. Now you know what that word does, and that lesson is permanent.

the experimentsame prompt, swap only the style: linocut print → gouache → ukiyo-e → art deco

Change two things at once and you learn nothing. This is the one habit that separates people who prompt well from people who reroll and hope.

Where to go next

Published here first.