Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How-To, and
today I'm going to show you how to make stickers using artificial intelligence – MidJourney,
to be specific – and then I'll show you how to clean up the images that MidJourney
gives you in Photoshop, so that you could potentially sell them or do whatever you wanted
with them. All right, let's get started! [Music] So the first step is to go
out to MidJourney.com/home, and you'll see this screen. You'll
want to join the beta right down here, and then mine says "invite invalid" because I
just did this a second ago, but yours should say "accept invite," so go ahead and click that.
I'm going to go ahead and continue to Discord, and if you don't have a Discord account, you'll
have to set one up. So you'll come down here to Register and make a new one with your email
and phone number. If you already have a Discord account, you can sign in, and I'll just go ahead
and do that now because I already have one. Now, when I was doing research for this video,
MidJourney didn't have a free trial anymore. If you're not able to get a free trial, you're
going to have to pay, which is a little expensive, but you can do a ten dollar per month plan, and
everything that each of these plans includes is right down here, and you can just pause the
video to see what you get with each plan. I do want to mention that with any of the paid
plans, you are able to use it for commercial use, meaning that you can sell the images
you make on your website, for example. So now I'm in Discord, I'm going to click on
the MidJourney server over here, and then I'm going to scroll down, and now you can choose
a newbies room. I'm going to go to Newbies 33, and here I can look at other people's
prompts and what they've made, and I can also type my own prompt in here.
So to do that, you can click down here in the bar and type “/” (and that's the same key as
the question mark), and then type "imagine," space, and then you can type your prompt.
Now, you can just type it here in Newbies 33 or wherever you happen to be, but I like
to create a new server for my prompts, and that way you can just see your prompts
instead of everyone's prompts. It can be a little hard to find your own if you put it in one
of these servers, so I'm going to come over here and add a server (that's the plus button). I'll
create my own and choose "For me and my friends," and then I'm just going to call this "Anne's
server," and I'll create it. And here it is. Now I'm going to go back to MidJourney.
Then you can scroll through, and most of them have this MidJourney bot
right here. I'll click that, and I'm going to choose "Add to server." I'll come down here
and select the server I just made and continue, and then I'll scroll down and choose "Authorize."
And then we'll have to do the "I am human" thing and "Authorize." So now I can go into that server,
and the MidJourney bot should be here. Then I can do /imagine (space) and type my prompt.
Now, when I'm making sticker prompts, first I enter "sticker," and then we
can do descriptive words like "kawaii." "Kawaii" is a Japanese word, and it means "cute.”
So, you could also put "cute" in here and then I'm going to describe what I want to see, which is a
bumblebee on a flower. I want it to be colorful, and then I'm going to enter a bunch of
sticker-type words like "Contour,” “die-cut sticker," "vinyl sticker," "flat image,” “2D," and
there are two types of images: raster and vector. Raster is like a photograph, it has little
pixels in it. The vector is made with math, so it's much more fluid and cartoony. And so,
using that term, MidJourney will know that you want a cartoon-style. SVG stands for scalable
vector graphics, it's kind of like JPEG except it's for vectors. And then, “white background”
and “simple.” I usually add parameters to my stickers if I don't want to see something, so
"--no" everything after the word "no" will make MidJourney NOT give me these things. So, if
I don't want text, I'll just put "--no text." Let's try that. Okay, and here's what we’ve got.
Now, you might notice this "--s 250," and that is a stylize parameter. If you have a low number
here, it'll produce images that closely match a prompt but are less artistic. And if you have
a high number, you're going to get more artistic images that maybe don't match the prompt as well.
Now, I didn't type this in, it just showed up, and that is because it's in my settings set
up that way. So, I'm going to hit /settings, and I'll hit enter or return twice, and here is
where the style is set. So, if I put it on style high, that will give me the --s 250 right here.
You can see it right here. If I change to very high, that'll change it to --s 750. For stickers,
I found that style high is very good, so the "--s 250." I'm going to dismiss this and now I'll try
another one. I want a little pony with a tutu, and these are the four variations that MidJourney gave
me. Now, I'm really liking this one, and you'll see these buttons under here, these correspond to
these, so this is 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you click U1, you're going to get an upscaled version of this.
The "U" means upscaled and then Versions. If I click V1, I'll get four different versions of
this image, and they'll be slightly different. So, let's go ahead and upscale this. The reason you
would want to upscale is that if you use this size, it will not print very well, it's too small,
and it'll be blurry. So, you need to have a much larger image, especially if you're putting this
on a print-on-demand website. Some of the stickers and other things they offer are really huge, so
it needs to be large enough to print well. Okay, and here is the upscaled image. I'm going to click
this, and then I'll choose "Open in browser," and now I'm going to right-click it and "Save
image as," and I'll just save it on my desktop. Now we need to make it even bigger, and to
do that, we'll need to go to an external site that just does upscaling. The one that
I like is called "Big JPEG," and you can just go to https://bigjpg.com/ and this is totally
free. So the first step, we're going to select the image we just downloaded. I put that on my
desktop, so here it is. And then I'll click Start for the image type I want: artwork, because this
is a more vector look. If you have a pixely one, you'll want photo. And then for upscaling,
I'm going to choose 4X. If you want 8 or 16, you have to pay for that, I think. And then
for noise reduction, I'll choose Medium, and I'll say Okay. And it'll take some time. Okay, so
now it's ready to download. I'll just click that, and it will go into my downloads. Now we'll bring
it into Photoshop and clean it up. I'm going to click and drag it onto my Photoshop icon. Now,
on most print-on-demand websites, they add this white outline for you, so you'll want to actually
get rid of that unless they specifically want you to add it on. But I definitely like that it's
there because it makes it very easy to select what I don't need. So I'm going to hit W on my
keyboard to get my magic wand tool, and I'm just going to select this gray out here. I want to
make sure that contiguous right here is selected, and you can see I've got all this gray, but
it didn't get this. So I'm just going to go ahead and choose Select > Modify > Expand,
and we'll put this out at about 10 pixels, and we'll say okay. And that got it somewhat.
It looks like I need to go a little further, so I'll do Select > Modify > Expand, and this
time I'll go with 40 pixels. That should put us into the white somewhat. Okay, and it did. I'm
going to expand it even more, maybe another 30. Okay, so now we have... if I zoom out, you
can see we've got all the gray out here, and we're cutting into that white outline,
which is what we want. Now I'm going to hit D on my keyboard to get a black foreground
color and a white background, and then I'll hit delete. Now I'll choose that background color of
white. You can also just choose white down here. Okay, and that pretty much did it. I see a few
little spots I need to clean up. I'll hit E to get to my eraser tool. I'm going to make my
brush a little bit smaller. I'm doing that by holding Ctrl+Option and dragging to the right and
left. On a PC, you can right-click and hold Alt, I believe, and then drag to the right
and left to increase or decrease your brush size. I'm just going to get rid of
these, maybe smooth this out a little bit. When you zoom in really
close, it looks pretty nice, so the upscalers did a good job. I don't like this
eyelash right here. It doesn't look quite right, so I'm going to use my pen tool. I'm going to
come up here and make sure this is on “Path.” I want to just cut this off right about here.
So I'm going to start up here, click once, and I'm just going to click and drag
to get the shape I want eventually. Hold Option or Alt and click that to get rid of
that handle, and then I'll just click all the way out here because I want that gone too, and then
I'll complete the shape. I'll come over here to my Paths panel, and I'm just going to double-click
this, rename it, and so now I have path one here, and then I can hold Command and click
that to select it [CTRL click on pc]. Now, if I click back on my layers, I can see I only
have the one layer. So when I hit delete here and I fill it with white, it should just cut out
that piece, but it did the opposite which I don't want. So I'm going to undo with Command + Z or
Control + Z. I'm going to hit Shift + Command + I to get the inverse of my selection (that's
Shift + Control + I on a PC), and then I'll do it again. I'll hit delete and choose white, and
now it looks good like it should look. I'll hit Command + D or Ctrl + D so I don't have that
selection anymore, and then I'm just going to go ahead and come around and just kind of clean
this up. And I'll do this one with my brush tool. Now, if you're not getting the color you
want, hit X to switch your foreground and background (that's these two), so if you hit
X, this is what's going to happen over here. Okay, so it's looking pretty good. I'm going to
hit W again (that's my magic wand). I'm just going to click. I can see a couple of little dots here,
so I'm going to increase my tolerance to about 50. I'll hit Command + D or Ctrl + D to deselect,
and then I'll try again with my magic wand, and it looks like I have everything. I can see
some little places I missed, but the magic wand tool has selected those too, and then I'll hit
delete on my keyboard and fill with white. Now, I'm going to inverse my selection with
Shift + Ctrl + I or Shift + Command + I, so now I only have the pony selected. I'll
hit Command + J or Ctrl + J to put it on a new layer with no background. I'm going to
go ahead and throw my background layer away, and now we can see we have a transparent
background. I'm going to delete the extra pixels outside of the pony, and to do that, I'm
going to just crop. So I'll hit C on my keyboard to get the crop handles up, and then I'll hold
Option or Alt and just bring this pretty close, and I'll also bring the sides in. That looks
pretty good. I'll hit Enter or Return to commit the changes. Okay, so let's see how big this
is going to be. I'll go to Image > Image Size, and now I'm going to change this to inches.
I don't want to resample the artwork, so now when I change this to 300, it will update
my width and height. So this is going to be able to print at 9.6 by 11.8 inches at a really
nice resolution. It's not going to be blurry or anything like that, and so this is perfect.
And I'll say okay, and now I'll save this as a transparent PNG. So we'll go to File > Export
> Export As, and I'll change my format to PNG. Make sure transparency is checked, and then
Export, and I'll just save it to my desktop. So now we're done. Now I can upload this
to print-on-demand sites, and honestly, I'd probably clean it up a little more if I was
actually going to do that, like I don't like how the outline looks here. I don't like what's going
on over here or here, but after you get it all the way you want it, it would be ready to upload. Now,
I do want to mention that before you upload to print-on-demand sites, make sure that they accept
artificial intelligence designs because there's a little bit of controversy surrounding it right
now, and you don't want to break any of their terms and conditions. Alright, I hope this video
is helpful for you. If you want to see more videos like this, just hit the Subscribe button and the
little bell next to it, and you'll be notified every time a new video comes out. Alright,
I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!
