Kitchen sink prompt

Kitchen sink prompt

catdragon, scumbling, alcohol inks, nacarat, nigrescent, albescent, pastels, colored-pencil scribblings, Segmented collage, analytic cubism, handmade paper, kintsugi, crazy quilt, ripped dictionary snips, storybook collage snipsUse this prompt

Sometimes I come across new vocabulary, art techniques or other things that can be used in a prompt. Or ideas, words and phrases just pop into my head. As I have a lousy memory, I throw a bunch of them into a prompt at the same time as a way to remember or find them again. It's like my jotting things down on a paper napkin.

Word break down by categories

In this post, I'll be looking at definitions and displaying the vocabulary in the prompt.

Colors: nacarat, nigrescent, albescent, pastels

Art media: alcohol inks, handmade paper, crazy quilt, ripped dictionary snips, storybook collage snips

Art techniques: scumbling, colored-pencil scribblings, segmented collage, kintsugi

Analytic cubism didn't really make a strong showing as it felt like the segmented collage and traditional collage took over.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in P-image (oops, this was just dragon, not catdragon)

The fun thing with my kitchen sink prompts is that they are not a clear concept, being a string of random words, so the different models respond very differently as they focus on different words/phrases.

Looks like P-image focused on colored-pencil scribblings, segmented collage, analytic cubism, crazy quilt, ripped dictionary snips, storybook collage snips

Phrases like "colored-pencil scribblings" may function as a whole or separated into parts. So you might see colored-pencil scribbles or you might see images drawn with or colored in by color pencils or even color pencils laying on the page.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in GPT 1.5 low

You'll also start finding some models keep pushing things into their own specific style box while others will interpret art styles and mediums quite broadly and give you a much winder range. Gpt 1.5, for example, often pushes a certain look which tends to brand it as "look! I'm made by Gpt!" . It's a good look but does it work with what you want to do?

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Z-image turbo

Z-image turbo pulled out segmented collage among other words.

Segmented Collage

Google's AI explains that a segmented collage in art is a technique where an image or composition is deliberately broken into distinct, separate parts—or segments—and then reassembled or arranged, often with visible spaces or structural breaks between them.

So pieces are separated by white spaces instead of just lain upon each other as in more traditional collaging providing a kind of boundary. The idea is that the viewer will pay more attention to the pieces but also fill in the white spaces mentally and inventing their own narratives creating a new reality from the fragments. Often segmented collages are used to invoke complex ideas of fragmented memories, multifaceted identities, or chaotic experiences where the gaps are as important as what is seen.

Because "segmented collage" is a phrase, you'll see some models creating segmented collages while other make a more traditional layered collage.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Grok

Grok used the kintsugi effect in the collage, threading gold cracks throughout the image.

What kintsugi might look like in pottery

Kintsugi

Japanese art of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Kintsugi celebrates rather than hides the cracks imbuing the object with history. It highlights breaks rather than hiding them, treating repairs as part of an object's history. It is part part of the wabi-sabi philosophy of embracing imperfections, experiences, age, history and resilience.

I think kintsugi is pretty cool. In AI art, it almost always plays out as gold and not silver or platinum unless you add them as qualifiers. Even then, the pull towards gold is strong.

I've also used it in phrases like "kintsugi swirls" for example. The swirls will be in gold but the gold will have some texture to it.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Minimax

You can see here minimax focused on scumbling.

Scumbling

Scumbling is a painting technique where you apply a thin layer of paint with a dry brush lightly over an existing layer of paint. The bottom paint layer shows through adding texture, depth and atmosphere. Dan Scott at Draw Paint Academy explains more about scumbling and how it's used in painting here: https://drawpaintacademy.com/scumbling/

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Lucid: Creative style

Lucid went for the more traditional collage filling the background with layered handmade paper, ripped dictionary snips, and storybook collage snips

Here I'm just making up phrases for collage

handmade paper or handcrafted paper : tends to be textured paper that may or may not have colors or random patterns in it

snips versus pieces : snips tends to be smaller pieces; pieces tend to range a lot more in size
dictionary snips, storybook snips, magazine page snips (sometimes text, sometimes photos), magazine photo snips, book page snips (or bit, pieces, squares, whatever): all of these basically tell the AI if you want random text or random pieces of images on the bits of paper.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Ideogram v3 turbo

Ideogram went to town with the alcohol inks especially in the wings. I figure you've already worked with alcohol inks so I won't explain here. It's a lovely bleeding color effect that gets used a lot in AI images. I just threw it into the kitchen ink for color as it also tends to add vibrant colors to an image.

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Flux 2 Pro

Flux 2 Pro highlighted the color palette of nacarat, nigrescent, albescent and there's the handmade paper too. With colors, just saying a color like black may get you a solid unshaded black while blacks will give you more of a range. But there are vocabulary words that can give you ranges as well and a lot of them end in "-scent". Although sometimes "-scent" words might incidentally also give you a iridescent effect.

nacarat : red-oranges

nigriscent: becoming/gradations of blacks

albescent : becoming/gradations of whites

violescent: becoming/gradations of violets/purples

rubescent: becoming/gradations of red, reddening, blushing

This week's kitchen sink prompt in SeeDream 4.5

SeeDream did my colored-pencil scribblings but also showed the different fabrics that might show up in crazy quilting.

Crazy Quilting

Crazy quilting is a quilting technique where irregular fabric scraps of any shape are sewn onto a foundation (like muslin or batting) often embellished with embroidery, beads, and lace. Popularized in Victorian times, this technique creates unique, textured quilts. It's great for using up fabric scraps.

a good example of a crazy quilt in Grok

SeeDream was the only one that seemed to incorporate crazy quilting a bit rather than just collaging. Crazy quilting elements would probablybe more evidence if the prompt was augmented with mentions of fabric, embroidery, buttons and stuff like that. This grok image will show you kind of what a crazy quilt looks like

And this is the rest of the lot:

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Hidream i1 fast (For somer eason Hidream kept coming out a square even though I specified 16:9)

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Nano Banana

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Wan 2.6

This week's kitchen sink prompt in Flux 2 Klein

Word break down by categories

Colors: nacarat, nigrescent, albescent, pastels

Art media: alcohol inks, handmade paper, crazy quilt, ripped dictionary snips, storybook collage snips

Art techniques: scumbling, , colored-pencil scribblings, segmented collage, kintsugi

Analytic cubism didn't really make a strong showing as it felt like the segmented collage and traditional collage took over.

a vibrant analytic cubist catdragon in SeeDream 4.5

Conclusion

Usually with a kitchen sink, I might just do one and then throw it into my kitchen sink folder for the days I want to remember & use different prompt words. Think of them as mini suitcases of vocabulary. However, I think it's fun to do different because the sheer randomness of the images is almost like a Surreal technique of introducing chaos into image creation. It's fun. I hope you also had fun with me and my kitchen sink vocabulary.