You Can Use DALL-E to Create Stunning Custom Phone Wallpapers

We all spend huge amounts of time staring at our phones, so why not make your phone’s lock screen and wallpaper something that makes you feel happy, or otherwise match your tastes? DALL-E 3 is a great tool to make stunning wallpapers.

How to Make Images With DALL-E 3

While DALL-E 3 can be accessed directly in a few ways, the simplest way to use it is via a paid ChatGPT Plus subscription, and so that’s the method I’ll be using here. However, you can also use DALL-E for free through Copilot or through Microsoft Designer.

Incidentally, I’ve also covered how to use MidJourney to create wallpapers for phones and other devices, but if you already have a ChatGPT Plus subscription, you can generate unlimited images with DALL-E 3 already. Well, if you do too many at once, ChatGPT will ask you to wait, but unlike the basic MidJourney plan, you don’t have a hard monthly limit.

Making images with DALL-E 3 and ChatGPT is pretty straightforward. You don’t need to do anything special, just open a new chat and make sure you’re using GPT-4. You can see the current model you’re using in the top left corner of the chat window.

If you’re using the mobile app, you can check the same place more or less.

Then use natural language to tell ChatGPT what sort of image you would like. Unlike MidJourney or Stable Diffusion, this method means that you yourself don’t have to craft a detailed prompt. ChatGPT will take care of it for you.

After ChatGPT has presented you with the image, you can tell it whether you like it or not and how you would change things. Just keep in mind that most of the time you won’t get exactly the same image again with your changes, but a whole new image based on your further requests. You can, however, instruct ChatGPT to pass a prompt you have written on to DALL-E 3 verbatim.

Now that we have the basic process down, let’s look at making some stunning wallpapers for your phone.

Does Aspect Ratio Matter?

Your phone’s screen has a specific aspect ratio. That’s the ratio of the width and the height of the screen. The most common ratios are 9:16, 9:21, 9:19, and so on. You can simply look up the aspect ratio of your phone screen to know what it should be.

You can ask DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT to produce images of a specific aspect ratio, but at the same time, you don’t actually have to make images with the exact aspect ratio of your screen. Whether you have an Android phone or an iPhone, you can use any image for your wallpaper and simply pinch, zoom, and drag it to look the way you want. So, for example, you can take an ultrawide wallpaper, and simply use a portion of it for your wallpaper. You can even use different parts of the same large wallpaper for your lock screen and home screen, to get a nice feeling of cohesiveness.

The bottom line is that you can generate images that are exactly the aspect ratio of your screen, or are large, and it’s all good. As long as you don’t have an image that’s too small to fill your screen. This can actually be particularly useful for lock screens, where you want to leave room for widgets.

The best way to show you how to make stunning wallpapers with DALL-E 3 is by example, and I’ll give a few here to show you the process. I’m going to pick a few image categories that lend themselves to stunning wallpapers (that’s the first step) and then see if we can get something great from the mind of DALL-E.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

One of the most popular types of wallpaper involves photos of galaxies, planets, and stars. There are few things as awe-inspiring as images from our universe. You can use DALL-E to make similar images, but with a bit of your own panache. Let’s start off with something simple.

Prompt:Please make a 9:21 phone wallpaper of galaxies in space with bright vivid colors that will really show off the latest OLED screens.

I re-ran this prompt several times to get a few different iterations until I found two that I liked.

But we’re looking for stunning wallpapers here, not some mediocre galactic watercolors, so how can we work with this? Let’s try a followup:

Prompt: Let’s take that same idea, and instead make it look like perfect, high-end astro-photography.

Now we’re talking! You can go on and ask for much more creative things, like a galaxy made out of cotton candy, or stained glass.

(Artificial) Nature

People love nature imagery, which makes it a little ironic that you can make some picture-perfect art with Artificial Intelligence.

Prompt: Create a 9:21 wallpaper that shows macrophotography of a poisonous Amazonian tree frog

These look pretty convincing, but don’t forget that you can ask ChatGPT to take this concept and change it to different art styles, color palettes, or whatever you can think of. You don’t have to stick with photo realism.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Sci-Fi and Fantasy gives us carte blanche to create anything we can put into words, and what I like to do is roll in classic art styles from the different eras of the genre.

Here I’ve asked for a giant mech using the gritty Western sci-fi art of the 90s.

Or pulp 70s sci-fi spaceships.

Why not a little classic tabletop-style fantasy artwork.

As you can see, the variety of styles is essentially infinite.

Abstract Art

Not everyone likes images with recognizable objects or people in them, which makes abstract art the best choice. Just ask ChatGPT for abstract art and roll the dice, or be more specific and ask for geometric, or fractal art, for example.

Remember that if you’re using DALL-E 3 through ChatGPT Plus, you don’t even have to come up with the ideas yourself. You can just ask ChatGPT for some phone wallpaper suggestions and roll with the ones that sound most appealing to you.