How To Create A Thumbnail With AI Illustration?

Welcome to Thumbmachine Video Tutorials! Today, we are going to create a thumbnail for a video about Elon Musk.
We have the hero image ready. It was made with our stable diffusion text-to-image A I. The prompt was very simple; we entered: “Illustration of Elon Musk piloting a helicopter,” and we got some very good results at once.

So let’s talk about the colors. We must select intense, bright colors.

Since the original color scheme from the hero image is rather dull, we will use this shade of blue only. Let’s also pick some intense red and another shade of blue!

Let’s enter the thumbnail text.
It should be as short as possible. Top videos don’t have long sentences on their thumbnails. As people scroll down, they don’t have time to read long text.

Our hero image has an illustration style, so neon is not what we want. This text with the red hard shadow underneath looks like a good match. Let’s see some variations!
Let’s move the text a bit upward. Not bad at all; it looks like the cover of a comic book!

Since we already have the artwork and text in the works, why not go for one more?
Turning off the “Glitter” tag will eliminate those cinematic-style thumbnails. We want that comic book feeling, no gradient colors, or shiny effects.

Let’s try this one. Vary placement only.
Now let’s change the colors and fonts.

Since the text block is very big, there isn’t too much room for placement variations. Nevertheless, let’s see.
Click on one of the images to turn on manual placement mode. Shrink it. Perfect. Now let’s generate the image again.
And there we have a stylish thumbnail for our video! Let’s get the final image at 1280 by 720 pixels.

Maybe that red-blue letter version was even better? Let’s go back to the last four styles by selecting “get new styles”!
This one at the bottom. The colors and the font style look very good, so let’s just go for a different placement.
Again, it’s better to do this manually. The text block should be on the right side; all we need to do is shrink it.
Now we have two thumbnail images for conducting A B testing!