Learn how to generate custom illustrations and story with AI, personalize the pictures with your child‘s image, and put it all together with a simple editor. A few hours of work for a lifetime of memories!
Creating a personalized book for your child is a beautiful, meaningful way to show them how much you care. In the past, this was an activity reserved for the highly artistic or those with the time and money to make it happen.
But now, thanks to advancements in AI technology, anyone can put together a book that puts your kid at the center of the story.
With a few clicks of a button, you can give your little one a gift that they‘ll treasure for years to come.
Creating a unique children’s book for your child in a matter of hours is now possible with Midjourney and ChatGPT! Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Generate custom illustrations using AI.
Step 2: Write a story using AI.
Step 3: Put it all together with Canva.
Creating this personalized ebook for your child or children is so easy, it takes just three tools.
If you‘re not yet familiar with ChatGPT, it‘s an AI model that can generate stories, poems, articles, and other large texts based on what you give it. Think of it as a creative writing assistant.
For instance, if you give it the prompt ‘puppies‘, it will create a 500–word original story with puppies as the main characters.
Getting great results from ChatGPT is all about creating the right prompt. You get out what you put in.
First, think about what kind of story you want to create. What do you want the protagonist to do? Who’s the target audience? What style are you going for? How long will each page need to be?
We recommend using this prompt and swapping out details in the [brackets] to create your customized story. You can add details about the aesthetic, style influence, subjects and plot.
By doing it like this, we can get everything formatted page by page, plus some great ideas for images to include in the story.
Spend some time editing the story and tinkering the prompt until you‘re really happy with it!
When it comes to generating images for your book, Midjourney is the leading image generation software and the one we recommend using. It’s easy to use and the images generated with the latest version are almost flawless.
But if you‘re looking for a free option, there are plenty of free image generators you can use, such as Nightcafe, Stable Diffusion, and more with varying features and qualities.
In this section, we‘re assuming you already know how to use Discord to prompt the Midjourney image generator. If not, get started with Midjourney’s quick start guide.
And if you‘re new to image prompting in general, don‘t worry — we have a lot of resources to help you get up to speed.
These are the prompts we used to achieve the black and white lined style of a traditional coloring book.
Now that you have a generated story from ChatGPT and some mid–journey prompts to create black and white line art for a coloring book, let‘s use these prompts to create images featuring your child.
To illustrate this, we’ll use the first page of our ChatGPT generated story as an example.
“Timmy loved going to the park to play. He would climb trees, chase butterflies, and swing on the monkey bars. One day, as he was playing hide and seek, he stumbled upon a strange object half-buried in the ground. It was a shiny, silver key!”
This is the image we will create using the picture of Timmy.
The first step in creating a scene with AI is to find a clear and photograph of your child for the AI to source when it creates new pictures.
Here are some tips for selecting a good source image:
When you use an image as a seed image, Midjourney will generate more images based on it. For example, if you upload a picture of a little boy with curly hair, Midjourney will create images of similar looking boys with curly hair.
To set your seed, simply send the image into your Midjourney bot chat window on Discord. Right–click on the image, and select “Copy link”.
You can now use this image link in your prompt and when the AI creates the image it will take the source image (the one we sent of Timmy) as well as the text prompt into account.
Your prompt should look like this: [image link] followed by a text prompt:
In the screenshot below you can see the image output.
It doesn‘t quite look like an image from a coloring book yet. But don‘t worry, we‘ll show you in detail how to use image weights to influence the output and make your images look more like the traditional line coloring book pages
Because we’ve given Midjourney a photograph, and asked it to create a line drawing, it is giving a result in the middle of the two mediums.
What we actually want is a line drawing that can be colored in, so we need to reduce the weight of the source image, so that the AI relies more on the text prompt we’ve written rather than the photograph.
This is done by adding the following command to the end of our prompt:
Now you can prompt a series of images representing each page of the story. Simply swap out the part of the prompt that describes the scene.
We created these pictures using seed images along with our coloring book prompts:
If you want your coloring book to have a vibrant and colorful title page, you can edit your prompt to achieve this effect.
We used this prompt to create a title page for our AI coloring book Ministories and Coloring, but you can customize your title page to look however you‘d like.
Canva is a great tool to use to bring all of the elements of your storybook together in a professional, pre-formatted way. If you are unfamiliar with Canva, you can easily create a free account and sign up.
To begin, log into Canva and look for a book template by using the search bar. You will then be able to customize the template to perfectly fit your story.
After selecting a template, click the “Customize this Template“ button to be taken to the editor. Here, you can insert your story and any images you have from Midjourney.
Once you have added your pictures and story to Canva, you’ll have a personalized book that is tailored to your childrens’ individual style, preferences, and interests.
It could look something like this:
In this course, you learned how to make a personalized coloring book from scratch using a picture and a text prompt.
These concepts can be easily applied to other mediums, for personlizing your next Christmas card, sending out wedding invites and much more.
We want to see your art! Don’t forget to upload your own creations for the chance to win a Promptlib art contest; special prizes are up for grabs.
We're so excited to see you again!
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