Grimm in Wonderland: Prompt Engineering with Midjourney to Illustrate Fairytales

The quality of text-to-image generation is continuously improving, yet the boundaries of its applicability are still unclear. In particular, refinement of the text input with the objective of achieving better results – commonly called prompt engineering – so far seems to have not been geared towards work with preexisting texts. We investigate whether text-to-image generation and prompt engineering could be used to generate basic illustrations of popular fairytales. Using Midjourney v4, we engage in action research with a dual aim: to attempt to generate 5 believable illustrations for each of 5 popular fairytales, and to define a prompt engineering process that starts from a pre-existing text and arrives at an illustration of it. We arrive at a tentative 4-stage process: i) initial prompt, ii) composition adjustment, iii) style refinement, and iv) variation selection. We also discuss three reasons why the generation model struggles with certain illustrations: difficulties with counts, bias from stereotypical configurations and inability to depict overly fantastic situations. Our findings are not limited to the specific generation model and are intended to be generalisable to future ones.