Image prompting lessons: stop describing the image, hand the model a reference sheet

Thirteen rounds, one afternoon, one word. The word was ONLINE and I wanted it drawn in a particular chunky cartoon style. I have the whole log because I was writing down what changed each round, which turned out to be the only reason I can now say anything useful about it.

Short version up front, since it isn't a twist: no amount of rewording got me there. I ended up drawing a reference sheet by hand and pointing at it.

I picked letters for this on purpose. Most image work gets judged on taste and those arguments go nowhere, but "is that an R" has an answer, and so does "is that corner curved". You can be wrong in a way somebody can check.

The scorer was happy the entire time

There was an aesthetic scorer in the loop. Every round it came back somewhere between 8.5 and 9.0. My own rating of the same images started around 3 and ended around 9.

Round 1, scored 8.5:

I had asked for small torn notches at the tips of the strokes. This has cracks across the entire body of every letter, plus a gloss I never mentioned.

The scorer was not malfunctioning. It is a decent-looking image. It answers "is this good" and I was asking "is this the thing I described", and once your model is competent enough to produce non-garbage those two questions stop being related. If I had let the score gate anything I would have stopped at round 1 and shipped a picture of broken glass.

Rounds 1 to 3 were aimed at something that was not there

Here is the part I am least pleased about.

I had looked at my reference at normal size, as a whole word, and read it as rounded letters with torn spikes poking out. So I spent three rounds describing torn spikes.

There were no spikes. When I finally cropped out single letters and blew them up, the letterforms were polygons made of straight facet cuts, and the things I had read as spikes were just the corners where two straight edges met. Nothing in that reference was torn, ripped, or broken. Three rounds of careful prompt surgery, aimed at reproducing a defect in my own eyesight.

Zoom in on one element before you write a single word about it. Whole-word at thumbnail size gives you the vibe and lies to you about the geometry.

The word you picked is arguing with you

This is the expensive one, and it happened three separate times with three different words.

I wrote	I meant	I got
chamfer	a flat angled corner	a 3D bevel, side faces lit and everything
puzzle-piece-like	letters sitting tightly together	jigsaw tabs. Actual ones.
paper cutout	flat, no depth	flat, with fold creases

That is round 10. I got precisely what I typed and nothing I meant.

The part that cost me rounds is that you can't fix this by pushing harder in the other direction. By round 8 the prompt carried "no 3D", "no bevel", "no side faces", "no internal lines", and the extrusion came back anyway, because chamfer and cut both point hard at "something was sliced here, show the marks". A pile of denials does not outvote the word itself. The word has to go.

So when a constraint keeps losing, stop reinforcing the constraint. Go find what it is losing to.

Say what it is, not how it got made

Two phrasings that mean the same thing to a person:

corners cut at irregular angles             # how it got made

the outer silhouette of every letter is an
irregular polygon, straight edges meeting
at sharp corners of varying length          # what it is

The first kept giving me cut marks. Seams inside the letter body, creases, and the little lit faces you would see if something really had been sliced through. The second gave me the shape and stopped.

My guess is that a verb names an event, and pictures of events come with the mess the event leaves behind. I would not push that too hard as a theory. As a habit it has held up: when junk keeps appearing inside the subject that you never asked for, go read your prompt for verbs.

Words about the room change the letters

The prompt is split into a subject half and a scene half. I had assumed that split meant something.

Material vocabulary in the scene half, describing the room, leaks onto the subject every time:

• edge, core, depth used about the environment, and the flat letters grow 3D extrusion
• voxel or cube, and the letter edges go blocky and stair-stepped
• plastic, toy, brick, and the letters soften and round off

None of those were about the text. There's no compartment in there for "this clause is scenery". I ended up banning material words from the scene half entirely, objects and space and light only, and the drift stopped.

Giving up and drawing it

By round 11 the shape of the problem was obvious. Every fix moved something else. Tighten the silhouette, gloss comes back. Kill the gloss, the shape goes wrong. Fix the shape, a metaphor drags in creases. I was not converging, I was circling.

There is also an embarrassing middle stretch I have skipped over, where I landed a version I liked at round 5, showed it, and was told round 4 had been closer. Rounds 6 through 8 were me trying to get back to something I had already had.

So I drew the thing instead: a full A-Z and 0-9 sheet in the target style, one image. The prompt shrank to a pointer, roughly "follow the letterform skeleton in the reference, make the surface cleaner than the reference."

Eleven rounds of problems went away in one go. Not gradually. The 3D, the seams, the gloss, the jigsaw tabs, the creases, all of it, in a single generation.

Yes, drawing the sheet was work. It was less work than eleven rounds, and I still have the sheet.

One thing the reference could not do

It locked the shape, which also meant I could not change anything.

The last round wanted that exact shape with a glossier finish. Asked for in one sentence, the gloss dragged the 3D back in, same as round 8. Split across two sentences it behaved:

The 2D silhouette of every letter must stay identical to the reference.
No change to the letterform shape itself, no extrusion, no added bevel geometry.

Within that unchanged shape, push the surface material to a glossy,
high-shine polished enamel finish.

Identical information. Two sentences. I don't have an explanation for why that matters and I am slightly suspicious of it, but it has reproduced every time I h
ave needed to hold one property and move another, so I keep doing it.

If you take one thing from this: text is fine for a couple of constraints and it falls apart once you need five of them true at the same time. That is not a prompting skill issue, it's the channel. When you notice yourself circling, the question to ask is whether the thing you are describing could just be handed over instead.

This came out of building typeface generators, which live at fontvibe.ai. Nothing above needs them.