It's that time of the year again! But let's be honest. It's always that or this time of the year: Halloween, Saint Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter, Chinese New Year, you name it.

So many reasons to send a token of attention or affection to loved ones! I'm talking about postcards, and with this research, I want to explore how they can be designed with Midjourney AI.

Here are some styles that will help you (with the touch of your artistic spark) to create a unique and memorable postcard for various holidays!

Star Wars Day postcard by Laurie Greasley --ar 2:3 --v 4

Marine Biologist Day postcard by Ernst Haeckel --ar 2:3 --v 4

International Hacker Day postcard. Glitch art --ar 2:3 --v 4

TECHNICALITIES

Of course, sometimes, to get your postcard to printing, you have to fiddle with it. That might require basic Photoshop skills: to remove nonsensical writing, to add your own text, or to fix a glitch or two (yes, Midjourney is still bad with hands :)). I will briefly cover this postproduction stage and upscaling for printing at the end of this post.

For this experiment, I used the same prompt: [holiday] postcard by [artist] --ar 2:3 --v 4 or [holiday] postcard in style of [technique or genre] --ar 2:3. In captions, I will only mention an artist or a technique.

Also, I chose benchmark holidays a bit randomly, so sorry I missed your favorite! I hope you will be able to fill for me and generate some amazing postcards for it!

CHRISTMAS POSTCARD

no style modifier

by Felice Casorati

by Choi Jeong-hwa

by Ivan Bilibin

by Tyrus Wong

as Photogram

by Beatrix Potter

by Joana Vasconcelos

by Alson Skinner Clark

NEW YEAR POSTCARD

by John Bauer

by Robert Delaunay

Folk art

in Art Deco style

CHINESE NEW YEAR POSTCARD

by Ambrosius Bosschaert

by Felice Casorati

by Choi Jeong-hwa

by Ivan Bilibin

by Okuda San Miguel

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

no style modifier

by William Morris

by Yoh Nagao

Note how Midjourney will sometimes devote a postcard to an animal. This is what happens if you specify this year's animal in your prompts:

Midlibrary by Zdzislaw Beksinski --v 4

Midlibrary by Zdzislaw Beksinski --v 4

Midlibrary by Zdzislaw Beksinski --v 4

Midlibrary by Zdzislaw Beksinski --v 4

SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY POSTCARD

no style modifier

by William Morris

by Yoh Nagao

by Sergei Parajanov

in Fairy Kei style

in Fractal art style

by Kawacy

by William Morris

by Aries Moros

EASTER POSTCARD

no style modifier

by Tyrus Wong

by Felice Casorati

in Cloisonnism style

4TH OF JULY POSTCARD

no style modifier

by Ambrosius Bosschaert

in Abstract Expressionism style

by David Hockney

in Constructivism style

by Butcher Billy

by Franz Marc

Woodblock print

by Paul Rand

HALLOWEEN POSTCARD

by Franz Marc

Woodblock print

by Paul Rand

by Francis Bacon

by Horace Pippin

by Ivan Bilibin

by Ravi Zupa

by Anja Millen

by Tyrus Wong

by Tyrus Wong

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS POSTCARD

by Aubrey Beardsley

by Herb Lubalin

by Wu Guanzhong

by Tarsila do Amaral

by Nick Veasey

by Alphons Mucha

by Ravi Zupa

by Anja Millen

by Ambrosius Bosschaert

HAPPY BIRTHDAY POSTCARD

by Ralph Steadman

by Yoh Nagao

by Alan Fletcher

by Keith Negley

And from here, you can customize your prompts with more personal details related to the person you devote your postcard to. That way you will get unique and thoughtful results!

Merry Christmas to an introvert postcard by Edward Gorey --ar 2:3 --v 4

Happy Birthday to a cute geeky girl postcard. Pixel art --ar 2:3 --v 4

Easter postcard in noir detective style --ar 2:3 --v 4

EDITING MIDJOURNEY GENERATIONS WITH PHOTOSHOP

Oftentimes, Midjourney generations will feature a nonsensical writing (DRARIIIIA), or you might want to add your own text to it. I do with the most basic Photoshop instruments. In most cases, it's Content-aware fill to remove things or add parts of the image, and Text to add (surprise) text. :)

UPSCALING FOR PRINTING

One day, I will post a proper post on upscaling your generations, but I will keep it short today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Long-time photographer, I am used to keeping my images organized with Adobe Lightroom, which happens to have a built-in (AI-powered!) upscaler. It can double the resolution of your images. With the current Midjourney V4 upscaler, this allows you to go up to 2048x3072px (for 2:3/3:2 aspect ratio) or 2048x2048 (for square images). Technically, you can, but that's some degree of headache :]

Another thing I use Lightroom for is postproduction. There are a few easy steps I increase sharpness dramatically and then add grain to soften the image back, in a more organic way.

All that might be enough for a good quality 20x30 size print (depending on the initial generation quality, of course). Upscaler in V3 easily allows 40 by 60cm prints if you upscale them properly.

In fact, there are many ways to upscale your generations dramatically. But I will only mention two.

The first one is free but requires some tech savviness. I honestly wasn't motivated enough to get into that, but I see how people get excellent results! Here is an insightful post on Medium on how to use free neural networks for upscaling.

Another is Gigapixel AI. It is moderately pricey, but it's a one-time deal. And then you get all the updates forever and can upscale images up to 16 times the original. Of course, at this level, it only works with already great photos, to begin with. V4 generations are not that good, but in my experience, Gigapixel can smoothly upscale V4 square images to 4096x4096 without losing too much in quality. Good old sharpen+noise—and the results are ready to be a poster, not a postcard.

Let's see how Lightroom's Super Resolution compares to Gigapixel AI.

[ORIGINAL PNG]
Brutally stretched to 2048 ×3072 in Photoshop

[LIGHTROOM SUPER RESOLUTION]
Upscaled to 2048 ×3072

[GIGAPIXEL AI]
Upscaled to 2048 ×3072

I edited the Gigapixel AI upscaled image to add the text: 2023 and "Happy New Year 兔 you," where tù 兔 ("rabbit, hare") stands for English "to," so it reads "Happy New Year to You!".

I then sent the result to my local lab to print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic paper. It's dense (340g/m²), semi-glossy, has a subtle metallic glow, and adds a beautiful kick to colors.

[ORIGINAL GENERATION]
Chinese New Year of Rabbit postcard. Psychedelic art --ar 2:3 --v 4

[EDITED IMAGE]
Upscaled to 4096 × 6144 in Gigapixel.AI

[PRINTED POSTCARDS]
10×15 cm

Midlibrary by Zdzislaw Beksinski --v 4

Once again, I will do a separate post about upscaling soon. I hope this post helps you create your own unique postcards, personal and meaningful.

Happy That Time Of The Year, everyone!

Yours,
Andrei