A campaign hero I built from a text brief

The brief was one paragraph. A warm domestic scene, morning light, a mug of coffee on a wooden table, nobody in shot, room for a headline across the top.

That last part turned out to be the whole job.

The brief that could not be prompted directly

Room for a headline is a layout requirement, not a description of a picture. No model takes that instruction usefully.

What it translates to is negative space in a specific place, and that is something you can ask for.

So the prompt became a wooden table with a mug positioned low in the frame, morning light from the left, plain wall filling the upper half.

Describing where things sit rather than what the layout needs is the translation step, and it is the part briefs never do for you.

The rest of the brief was already promptable. Warm, domestic, morning light and no people are all things a model understands.

No people is the one clause I rewrote anyway. Negatives are unreliable, so it became an empty kitchen, which describes the same thing positively.

That change alone stopped people appearing in the background of about half the drafts.

Drafting across three models

I ran the same prompt on three models from the AI Models directory, each at its lowest resolution and one variation, which is the cheap way to find out who is good at what.

One gave the warmest light and put the mug too centrally. One respected the composition and produced a colder, flatter room. One did both reasonably and had a strange handle on the mug.

That spread is normal and it is why picking a model from its name is a waste of time.

It is also why running one model and concluding the tool cannot do something is usually wrong. Three cheap drafts answer a question that one expensive draft only guesses at.

Nine low resolution drafts across three models cost less than one high resolution final, which is the arithmetic that makes this worth doing every time.

I took the one that respected the composition and spent the next four drafts fixing its light rather than switching models again.

Fixing one thing at a time is the discipline that makes drafting fast. Changing the model and the prompt together tells you nothing about either.

Each of those four drafts changed a single clause about the light and nothing else.

All of it happened in the generation workspace, switching models from the same prompt without retyping.

What the prompt ended up being

Longer than the brief and more concrete in every clause.

The word warm came out entirely. It was doing nothing that low morning light from the left was not doing better.

Domestic came out too and was replaced by the actual objects. A wooden table, a linen cloth, a plain painted wall.

Abstract adjectives are what a brief is written in and they are the weakest part of a prompt. Naming objects is what actually moves a result.

The final prompt was four clauses and every one of them named something you could photograph.

That is a decent test for any prompt. If a clause describes a feeling rather than an object or a light, it is probably not earning its place.

The final and what it cost

Thirteen low resolution drafts, then two finals at the highest resolution that model offered.

The second final was the one used, because the first had the mug handle facing away from the reader and it looked accidental.

Total time was about forty minutes, most of it drafting rather than waiting.

The headline sat across the upper half exactly as the brief wanted, because the composition was designed for it from the third draft onwards.

What I would do differently is translate the brief before opening anything. I spent the first four drafts discovering that room for a headline is not a prompt.

Building an illustration from a description is a different job from tracing a photograph, and the other route is worked through in an invitation illustration from a couple photo.

Translate the brief, draft cheap across models, then pay once. Forty minutes and it was done.

The brief itself never changed. What changed was my understanding that a brief and a prompt are two different documents.

A brief describes what the image is for. A prompt describes what is in it. Nobody hands you the second one.

Writing the translation down first would have saved four drafts, and it is the step I now do before opening anything.

The other habit worth keeping is drafting at the ratio the final needs. Composing square and cropping wide throws away the part you spent drafts arranging.

Set the shape once at the start and every draft after that is telling you something useful.