Using DALLE2 to recreate Magic card art

Introduction: I've been working on my text-to-image "prompt engineering" skills. I ran out of ideas for images to make, so I started going through art from Magic cards: well-known cards, or well-known art, or just some personal favorites. This is sort of a journey through what DALLE2 does well, and what it doesn't, like the post about recreating album covers. For most of these (but not the first few sections), I tried to recreate the art from the Magic card.

Power Nine: This is the first set of cards that I tried to recreate the original art, so the prompts all included something like "oil painting" then a bunch of words to describe what was in the art. You'll see that the artifacts (Moxes and Lotus) are easy in general, but difficult in details, while the weird art for the blue cards are very difficult.

Original on the right, recreation on the left. I successfully got a teardrop shaped pearl, but the chain is also pearled. I tried for the same background (I described it as "speckled blue-gray and white granite" or something), and got something bluer than I had wanted.

I could not recreate the pentagonal shape or frame of the Mox Sapphire (again, and always, original shown at right).

Probably my best recreation overall, but there are still some issues. Note that none of mine are centered in the frame.

I asked for a swirling, chaotic abstract background, and I got a solid blue background. The circular shape is good, just like for the Jet.

The more I tried to describe the monster that is holding the emerald in its teeth, the further I got away from what I wanted, so I gave up. I couldn't even get a rectangular emerald. Worst of the five.

I could have tried harder here; I asked for a black lotus even though the original art is a dark blue. I wanted to show the lotus high above grassland, as if you're picking it on the edge of a mountaintop, but I couldn't get that to work.

I iterated a lot on this one. Cloudy day, palm trees, Chichen Itza; the background was pretty easy (although I don't have the imagined ancestors, or the tourists, or whoever those small people are in the original). I could not figure out how to describe the facial hair, helmet, and armor of the guy with his hands on his ears (face?). I eventually settled on something liked "armored Incan" and settled on what you see here.

Given that I can't really describe what is going on in the artwork of the original Time Walk to a person, I am pretty satisfied with what I got in my DALLE2 recreation.

Right mood, wrong art. As I tried creating this, I could either get a large hourglass or a person unraveling, but not both. It was even a challenge to get a person-sized hourglass.

Boons: These are the other four cards in the original cycle with Ancestral Recall. They're not great recreations. They demonstrate some things that DALLE2 gets wrong.

Dark Ritual was reprinted a bunch of times, almost always with cool art, and I like my version as well. I asked for the cauldron specifically, because I figured it would get the mood right, even if a cauldron isn't visible in the original art. The character is a "hooded wraith" with "bony hands."

Maybe my best recreation except for the Mox Jet. This shouldn't be a big surprise: it's a landscape, and landscapes are easy.

Giant Growth is hard because DALLE2 infers things about what sizes things should be relative to each other, even if you tell it not to. I had many iterations here of "giant mouse" "tiny skull" because it actually showed anything close to the proportions of the original art work. I wanted the mouse eating, and DALLE2 usually showed it eating cheese. In retrospect, I probably should have just gave up on the mouse eating.

I was lucky that this turned out as well as it did. "disembodied floating hands" are not a concept that DALLE2 understands well. Hands are bad in general; you can see that there are some issues with both thumbs above (one too long, one hiding).

Other instants and sorceries

This was the best of a handful of iterations, based on "forked lightning." That may not have been the best prompt, since lightning is vertical, not horizontal. I don't know what the red chocolate chip cookies are in the original artwork, but they didn't show up in what I asked for anyway.

A difficult prompt; you can't say "naked" but "loincloth" is ok. I couldn't get a figure in a corner of the art. I tried things like "Skinny muscular anatomical character" but didn't get anything close to what I wanted. Instead, this is thematically correct only.

Pretty good! My first try explicitly described the man in black as a "priest" but that put a cross in the room, so I just made him a man dressed in black. The original art here looks like it could be a DALLE output.

Couldn't get a face in the sky, and didn't dare describe the dead bodies in too much detail because I didn't want to get banned by DALLE2's NSFW filters (no violence, please).

Not bad, maybe I would have had better luck if I had explicitly asked for Jesus instead of a bearded man in a white robe.

Impossible. Disenchant is weird art, with the small red jewel as the only thing suggesting action in the artwork. My results ended with too much red and no action. I couldn't get runes either. This is the result of a few iterations, I'm lucky it came out as good as it did.

Enchantments and Artifacts

I didn't expect this to turn out well, and after multiple tries, it didn't. I wasn't sure how to describe the artwork for Mana Flare. Is that a signet, a badge, or a plaque? A birdseye view of a fountain? I tried signet, and oddly, DALLE2 interpreted that as "cygnet," or swan.

I had to attempt Stasis, one of the most notorious pieces of art in Magic. I couldn't get the character on the right to appear very well (I tried "blindfolded Anubis," maybe that was too confusing). The moon was always huge even as I asked for a tiny crescent moon, and the painter's palette usually didn't show up.

It wasn't hard to get a mine, but I could not get any of the magical parts of the mine. No eyes, no runes, not even an entrance shaped like a face.

This was one of my last attempts, and I thought it went well, all things considered. The character sort of resembles Freyalise, with a longer dress and longer hair (and no eyepatch; I have never got an eyepatch from DALLE2). The face is blurred too, which is pretty common. But the broader composition is pretty good: a magical green device glowing in a cave on a sort-of magical looking woman.

Creatures

Serra Angel was the first humanoid that I tried, and I tried a lot of iterations. I could never get her to hold the sword over her head, and she usually held the blade of the sword instead of the hilt. DALLE2 gives weird eyes sometimes, which fortunately wasn't an issue here since Serra Angel's eyes are closed.

This goofy guy is Prodigal Sorcerer in spirit, if not in complete resemblance. All of my prompts gave me dark facial hair and horizontal stripes, despite asking for white facial hair and vertical stripes. The pink from the beret often got pushed somewhere else: here, to the cheeks and stripes.

Pretty good, if not as detailed. The key here was to ask for a "long, stringy" jellyfish, which helped get away from close-ups of the mushroom part of a jellyfish.

Braids is another favorite card, like Pernicious Deed, and the art is one of the reasons why. "Steampunk" was part of the prompt here. Any time I asked for her goggles, she would wear them on her eyes instead of on her forehead.

This guy looks pretty cool, even if he doesn't look quite like the classic Hypnotic Specter. It also illustrates a common problem: I asked for red eyes, and instead I got some sort of weird red thing instead of his shoulder.

I'd call this a success, even if Uncle Istvan has a skull himself instead of just keeping one tied to his axe. That was a common problem as I tried to describe him in a text prompt.

I like the little angry molten dwarf from the original art, but I couldn't figure out a good way to describe him for a prompt. I tried "monster" and "dwarf," but neither really gave me the right look that I wanted. This is the best I got.

I started this out by choosing some of my favorite artwork, or the most iconic artwork, and trying to recreate it. So I guess I shouldn't be disappointed in how it turned out compared to the original. Here, I couldn't get the Craw Wurm to coil around the frame. This was the closest I got by far, and it's not good.

Not bad, as long as you don't look at her eyes for too long. But of course nowhere near as good as the original.

I tried this a few times before I got to this version. I could never get the hand coming out of the wall suggesting someone stuck inside of it.

My wild mongrel attempts looked more realistic than I had wanted. This one was doing most of the right stuff: running through a forest, with generally the correct color scheme. Not bad.

Original Dual Lands: These were the first Magic cards that I tried. I think DALLE2 does very well with landscapes. Landscapes seem to be good candidates for ML-generated art. I guess there are a few reasons for that: imperfections are less obvious, there is no need for symmetry or counting (DALLE2 loses track of how many fingers it has placed on a hand, so six fingers are common), and there are many landscapes for it to learn from.

For my prompts below, I chose specific artists (e.g., Monet for Tundra, Caspar David Friedrich for Bayou), and I requested the art to include a lot of the two colors that are "produced" by the land (e.g., for tundra, my prompt included "lots of white, lots of blue"). I did not try to match the original art, so I didn't include them here for comparison.

A relatively simple prompt: "tundra painting by monet lots of white lots of blue"

This is a bit dark to make out, but I think it is a birds-eye view of the underground sea, looking down from above. I didn't specifically ask for that, but I like it. "El Greco" was included in the prompt.

"Cezanne" was requested here.

Taiga by "Jacob Van Ruisdael"

Savannah was a bit difficult because it kept including animals in the art. I eventually got what I wanted with "savannah painting with single tree and white sky, lots of white lots of green, by thomas cole"

The hardest thing about the scrubland was that if I asked for "lots of black, lots of white," it came out monochromatic, so I added the secondary colors for white and black in Magic: "some yellow, some purple." Artist style is Van Gogh.

Georgia O'Keeffe. There were plenty of other options that were not as simple, but I liked how this used the "lots of blue, lots of red" to give me only a few streaks of red and blue, showing just the volcano, a large sea, and clouds over a red sunset. This would be a controversial pick for Magic card art, but I like it. I am impressed by how bold DALLE2 was in removing any other details.

Caspar David Friedrich, who is always good for realistic and detailed landscapes.

"empty mountainous flat plateau landscape painting in the style of studio ghibli with lots of red and white" I like how the flat part came out red and the mountains came out white (the opposite of what Magic card lore suggests).

Gauguin, and like the savannah, I asked for the tropical island to be "empty" because Gauguin and/or tropical islands are associated with inhabitants.

"Neon" duals. Not much to say about these, except that I tried prompts as above, but without the artist styles, and with "neon lighting" added to all of them to get a futuristic look. I thought they could be promotions for the recent "Neon Dynasty" expansion. I used the more recent Magic card frames here, since I thought these were closer to something we'd see in a collector's set of Magic cards today.

Basic lands: For these, I also tried for a specific style inspired by a Magic set. These prompts all included "Egyptian wall art" to match the Ancient Egyptian-flavored set, Amonkhet. Like the dual lands above, I asked for the specific colors corresponding to each land, with the plains and swamp also requesting yellow and purple.