Minimalism

How It Works

I’ve selected a couple of base prompts that describe common Minimalist subjects. I then have added each of the keywords below to show how that word affects the images Midjourney generates.

Check out the three images below to see Midjourney understands the prompts without any additional keywords.

I don’t know about you, but photography is not the first medium I think of when I think of Minimalism artwork. However, reducing a photo to its essential components is a common photography technique. It helps the viewer zone in on the part of the artwork the photographer would like you to focus on. It helps tell a story.

Not to mention it creates clean, stunning photos in Midjourney.

Ah, the most classic medium: painting! Minimalism can be used in basically any kind of painting: oil, watercolor, acrylic, you name it!

Since Minimalism’s practice is to strip artwork down to its basic elements, it doesn’t rely on stuffy details. Instead it focuses on geometry and contrast. Midjourney is especially skilled at Minimalistic paintings because there’s less room to make mistakes in all those details of usual paintings. Anything abnormal can be explained by minimalism’s being so abstract.

Sculpture was a popular medium during the emergence of the Minimalism movement. Artists felt free to create abstract shapes that seemed to live in their own reality.

Midjourney tends to have fun with this prompt. It creates simple, and otherworldly sculptures like the artist in the 60s. However, Midjourney does seem to have a bias towards largely white and earthy toned images that use a light concrete substance for its sculpture. During the original movement, artists tended to use more industrial materials.

This was one of the more surprising prompts I found during my research. Did you know the original Minimalistic artists often used industrial or commercial materials in their art? They were rebelling from the previous Abstract Expressionism artists who put such importance on symbolism and storytelling. Minimalists aimed for the art just to be art. For the art to live in its own reality and for viewers to focus on what it was made of rather than the story it tells.

It also has a pretty unique effect on Midjourney. It pulls the AI out of its bias for Minimalistic Digital or Vector artwork, and generates abstract, industrial pieces of art.

Adding “commercial materials” to your prompt tends to give your images more texture. It also has a similar effect as “graphic design” does: it generates images that look like they could be used in an advertisement campaign.

This prompt has more of a diverse effect in Midjourney. I expected it to have a similar effect as vector art or simple geometric, and while it can occasionally have that effect, it also can add mathematical lines and graphs to more complex images.

This prompt takes minimalistic images to a new level! It reduces the subject even further to its basics and creates more abstract and interesting images.

Minimalism is often cited as being inspired by the Russian Constructivism movement of the early 1900s. Constructivism was a design movement that sought to reduce its work to simple geometric shapes, so it’s easy to see where the two movements overlap.

When used in a prompt, these two art movements combine to create geometric, vector-ish art with a red, black, and white palette often seen in famous Constructivism work.