General Var-67 of the Queen’s own 33rd brigade.
In honor of their fourth planetary conquest.

Prompt: full body portrait, of an insect-like alien general with multiple limbs and cybernetic prosthetics and a full futuristic helmet, wearing a brushed steel futuristic armor and holding a lance, a red banner with alien markings is in the background, --ar 2:3 --sref https://s.mj.run/vPQ_MjNG_dg https://s.mj.run/s3TVS97HeQ0 --niji 6

Recently Midjourney introduced something called style reference, which allows you to use the style of one image and apply it to another. I wanted to try it out by creating a formal portrait painting for a futuristic alien general.

For this experiment I used the above prompt and a —sref parameter to reference two images:

My original alien general

A 19th century portrait of a general

At first I tried using only the 19th century general, but the image became too human-like. So I had to add one of my previous attempts to retain some of the alien aspect.

It was fun playing with the references, and I can definitely see some interesting uses for this. This is a rather mild version because I had a specific effect in mind. But it’ll be interesting to see what will happen with more extreme differences in style :)