My Complete AI Album Art Process: 59 Covers, One System

Hey guys so recently I published this song FOLD and I recorded the whole process of creating the album art from start to finish using AI like using all of my latest AI techniques and I thought it'd be helpful to finally share my process.

Since this is my 59th single that I published and that means I've created 59 unique pieces of album art not including all the experimentations and variations on the album art so I thought yeah this would be valuable to somebody who might be starting out or if you just want to see how my process is and see if there's anything you could steal or borrow so that's what this video is going to be about All right so how I begin is in Notion and I've over the last few months have been creating my Notion agent and honestly I think Notion is one of the easiest ways to build an AI agent but more on that in a different video.

So anyways I keep everything about my music and pretty much my whole life in Notion and I have this agent that just knows what I'm talking about and I store my prompts and my lyrics and stuff like that in the system and what I love about Notion is you could just say at whatever you do the at symbol and whatever document you want to call up and now you could have anything that you saved in those documents show up in your prompt and what is really mind blowing is when you start chaining together prompts so I'm going to show you what I do here to start the album creation process and it's pretty insane how easy it is so let's play this so I'm going to play this a little bit faster speed so I need I say I need to develop the album art for my song and look it's already loaded up I just do at symbol lyrics FOLD that's where all my lyrics are.

And then I do this prompt here I saved a prompt to generate the mindset album art so I have a specific prompt for generating my kind of album art.

And you'll see over all of my album covers even I'm surprised at how consistent the style has been even though I don't have a consistent color theme or anything like that.

Just by controlling the prompt, you could control how the album art looks and I'll give you a sneak peek right now into my Figma where I actually design all of the album art to see just how many different pieces of art I've created so far Okay so now what you're looking at is my actual Figma file for all of my album art.

So that's 59 different singles and you could see here I can't even zoom out far enough to show you everything in one shot.

This is as far out that Figma can actually zoom out so you can see here, every single album that I've created is on this page and what actually keeps the consistency is not just the layout, right?

You have this frame, you have the typography, you have pulling one of the colors from the image, but it's actually in the prompt itself that helps keep the images the covers consistent so I'll show you that now Okay so now I'm in Notion and this is the actual prompt document that I use and it's kind of complicated.

I want to kind of show you more about how I set up Notion and how I created my agent and how it all works together but I'll try to keep it simple for now so yes I have like this origin part about each document why this document was created and that just helps the agent understand a bit more context and then I have more information about my mindset album and that whole project and then it goes into the actual prompt and here is the prompt that I've been using to generate all of the album art so I say Okay you are a visionary art director and expert aI image prompt engineer specializing in creating compelling album art for music singles your goal is to help generate detailed AI image prompts based on song information and concept ideas so I basically broke it down into three steps for the agent and that's information gathering so make sure that I include the title and the song lyrics

and the any initial ideas I have for the album art and then if I'm missing any of the required elements which is like the song title or the lyrics it should warn me that it's just going to make things up because I didn't provide that information and I include the part about me including details of the image that I want to include because I sometimes have or often times I have an idea of what I want the album to look like but in the times that I don't I'll have the AI pitch to me ideas based on my lyrics and the concept behind the song and then we go into step two: concept development so if I provide concept ideas incorporate and build upon them if I don't provide concept ideas analyze the song title and lyrics to generate appropriate visual themes if I specifically ask you to pitch me ideas first present three to four different creative directions

before generating the final prompt and then step three is prompt generation.

Reference this ebook mentioned below for Flux best practices.

Especially regarding file name conventions so this sounds complicated but basically, a while back, I created an ebook that has best practices for prompting Flux it was an open-source image generator that was free to use on your local PC or Mac and at the time you really had to be good at prompting to get the best out of the models.

So I had AI scour the internet and then create an ebook as a prompt guide for AI to create the prompts now you probably don't have to do this level of detail with the current AI models but this still seems to work for me, so I didn't change it so I have it reference a ebook that I made for best practices and then it generates the prompt based on the best practices now here's where we get to the consistency part so how I make sure that the AI album art is consistent every time is I have a base template for how I want the prompt output to be given so we have the base portrait setup, we have the lighting technical specifications atmosphere style elements color scheme, primary color, secondary color, theme-specific concepts, and genre specifics.

So basically how I created this was when I created my very first album art I uploaded that album art to an AI and I said Okay based on this image I want you to create a prompt template so that every image that you generate from now on will look similar to this image and I'll show you the exact image that I based this prompt on so this is actually the original first cover I ever generated and I can't even remember if it was like Dali or Flux I can't remember but anyways after I generated this I was like Okay I want this style and amazingly it I think it did stay consistent all the way across to my 59th album.

What I would recommend is that you don't copy my prompt what you do is you generate your style or your first album art cover, and if you want to have that as a consistent look across all of your album art you would feed that to the AI and then ask it to create a prompt template and one that you could customize different elements from it so for me I asked it to give me a base template prompt and then I want to be able to customize like the primary and secondary colors and you could just keep refining it from there so that's what I would recommend is like create your first album art if you can and then if you want to keep that as a theme or actually you could use somebody else's album art and just extract their template that's not copying. That's inspiration, because you're not actually copying it you're just drawing the elements from it and so that's what I would recommend is create your own

template, and then create your own prompt to generate that template over and over again.

Okay, so we are back in my prompt document.

And so you could see that it's this three step process and then it also references this ebook and it also has a base template so we haven't the only thing we haven't looked at yet is the ebook so let's take a look at that.

And so this is the thing is I created this ebook but I never actually sold it or put it up for sale or or made it available to anybody.

So if you guys want this ebook let me know in the comments and I will make it available to you guys comment if you want it.

So that is the whole prompting step.

So let's go back to the process now Okay so we're back in my recording of the process and you'll see here this is why I love Notion and using it as a a home base for your AI use because now that whole process that I just showed you is compressed into this one sentence.

So I just say I need to develop album art for my song in this document and then I chain onto this the prompt document so that's what's beautiful about Notion is you could chain the documents one right after the other and you save so much time that way Okay so now let's continue.

So it's generating now based on this one sentence but you could see that the one sentence that I typed here actually chains together two documents, and it's quite a lot of information that it's compressing so I'm going to speed this up here Okay so now it says, pulling FOLD's themes through the mindset prompt template.

Now core read is poker player poker as strategic mastery and the power in the fold: confident discernment, so crimson and gold, floating cards, chips, retro futuristic etc.

So when I saw this I was like no I don't really want that I agree with the card player that's what I had in mind at the beginning but I didn't want those colors so let's see where it goes.

What's cool about Notion also is that they integrated image generation.

So you could generate images right in Notion but you have to be aware that they are limited to only a few generations at a time.

Okay, one second.

It was kind of glitching out there, but yeah in Notion, you could only generate about 10 images per day or something like that, or per hour.

For a while, it seemed like it was unlimited, but I started getting rate limited recently so I would say you might need some other image generator I think ChatGPT it allows you to generate a good number of images for free on the free plan.

Let me get back to this.

So what happened was I was like Okay I want the card player but I thought Okay what if she were more like this female asian version of gambit from X-Men so I started thinking about the color purple as the primary color and Electric Blue as the secondary color and she's holding the cards fanned out, like I remember seeing in comic books for gambit so let's see what it generates and one of my themes across all of the album art is that it's K-pop style and that's because my inspiration was with K-pop but more Korean R&B so it's along that aesthetic so let's rewind here to what I actually said here so what I realized was actually I don't like the image generation that Notion is doing I want to have more control over it and I think ChatGPT and Gemini would do a better job that's why I'm right here I'm telling it to say just give me the prompt don't generate the image. That's going to save me time.

I don't want to see the images it generates I just want the base template of the prompt that I could put into other AIs so sometimes it omits the prompt so I had to say give me the prompt from the last image so here it's going and then now I finally have the prompt Okay so now I'm in ChatGPT and I gave it this prompt so this is the exact same prompt that Notion had.

Let's see what it generates from that same prompt in ChatGPT and right away this is way more what I was hoping for for the image so I was like Okay this is awesome.

Now I want to refine this of course, it's holding a bunch of aces, and it doesn't quite make sense because the back of the card has the ace on it, like it's revealing what the card is on the back of the card.

Now I'm going into Gemini and seeing what it generates from the same prompt.

And then now I go back to ChatGPT and I start asking for some variation on it so I'm saying Okay try another version but a more dynamic composition because I think this composition is kind of boring and then make it so that she's firing the cards at the viewer.

Then I switched back to Gemini this is Gemini and this is what it generated and I'm not really feeling this version and also I think the cards don't make sense here so I'm trying to make it more realistic so I'm trying to say make it a royal flush with spades and then I switch back to ChatGPT and now this is like exactly what I was hoping for this is it. This is the version.

But I'm saying like OK I'm seeing that the cards look weird because it's showing the face side, but the faces don't actually make much sense.

So I'm saying make the cards have faces visible where the ace of spades and king of spades are visible.

So and I'm trying to specify exactly which cards should be which and seeing how ChatGPT handles this task so I switch back to Gemini and I don't really like how it's going at least it did bring up the proper cards.

But it's showing duplicates so I was like Okay forget that concept let's just show the back of the cards.

Okay so now I got the updated generation of using the prompt from Chat gPT with this composition and seeing how Gemini handles it and it's clear who the winner is.

Yeah Gemini just didn't understand the task or just didn't really get what I was going for so now I'm requesting the exact same prompt from here to hopefully steer this one better.

Because I think what I did here was I tried to steer the existing image but now I'm doing straight from a fresh chat this exact prompt.

So what I'm doing here yeah I've shared this in a previous video with my whole it's called like my full DistroKid process this is just my way of organizing my files.

So when I sep when I save these files these images from each of the platforms I put them in these folders so I know which platform I generated each image from so I'm saying Okay this is the ChatGPT gambit card throw version 1 and then I'll go back and date this file name or the folder name and created one for Gemini well Gemini is still creating so now I pasted in and boom that is looking closer to what I wanted but it's still nowhere close to what ChatGPT gPT generated I really like the more dynamic feel of this one the composition just looks way better.

It's more balanced than this one.

You know there's this empty space here, and she's too static.

So now I'm because she's too static I'm saying OK make her like flying through the air like it's a movie action shot.

Let's see what it says.

Make it high action, in the middle of an action scene from a movie and don't show anyone else in the concept.

So now I'm in Figma and you're you're going to see that I'm going to just take the last album that I did album art and then I'm just going to copy and paste it down here and then I'm going to change the name paste in the new art, update the title, and grab a color from the background.

And in this case I thought the purple was too strong so I ended up choosing white but I might change this in the future to this pinkish color, but anyway, that's how I lay out the album art once I have concepts that I'm liking so here we got another image generation from Gemini so I'm putting that into Figma and I'm just copying these over, trying to see if there's a color that works for the text against the background.

And then I'm yeah seeing how the Gemini plays against ChatGPT and then I I started to think Okay I love the first version that ChatGPT made but let's generate some alternatives just to make sure this is the best composition.

So I said I love the last image you generated but let's generate a few other versions along the same lines, different compositions and different action poses so this is when I got more of these which I did really like so I started to bring these over into Figma so I started grabbing these in here just to see what they look like and that's that right there.

That's the four main ones that I liked and now I'm just adjusting the composition exactly how I want it and this one was unfortunate because, if you see here, it rendered the hands all messed up.

And so I'm like trying to find a crop for this image that gets rid of that problem over here.

Look at those spaghetti hands.

So now I'm back here and I'm trying to fix the spaghetti hands and because I really like that composition but now look at it. It's mangling the hands.

I try to fix the hands again right and then I'm still not happy with how it I wasn't happy with how it generated the last one you could see here like it ended up changing both hands and I didn't want that and the other hand still looks messed up.

So I just decided Okay I'm just going to crop the original one and see if that works sometimes you just have to give up on AI Okay so now I'm doing a QR code version which I talked about in my other video basically it links people to my mindset album playlist where they could find this song.

And I think that's it so that is the full process of me creating the album art from scratch.

And now I'm just going to show you the upload process Okay so in my other video I've covered this extensively like the full DistroKid process but I just wanted to show you what happens like after I generate my album art so I'm just going to take you through this and speed run it right so I'm just filling out the form and then I'm finding my album art here we go I decided to go with the first one and then yeah I'm just going to speed run this so just copying and pasting the main title for the album into all of those fields.

And so yeah I just wanted to share with you guys the full process of getting the album art created and all the way to being uploaded.

There's also my other video, which will be linked below which you should check out for the full uploading process I did a full video just on how to upload using this form, because it is kind of daunting.

But that's it.

So I'm just going to speed all the way to the end and you could see that I'm just finding the I was just finding the right time codes for giving the social media sites where the best parts are in the song.

And that's it so we get to the upload part, and you know the drill.

You double-check your work, and then you hit Continue.

But that's it that is my complete process for creating album art.

I hope you found that helpful if you did, don't forget to hit Like and Subscribe, hit the notification bell, share with a friend, and use my discount code if you're uploading to DistroKid for the first time it supports the channel, and it gets you 7% off.

So that's about it.

Let me know what you want to hear in the next one.

I'll see you later in the next video