Writing art direction that gets the label you pictured

The art direction box takes up to 4,000 characters and it is the difference between a label that is fine and one that is the thing you pictured. Most people either leave it empty or fill it with instructions the builder has already written.

Start by deleting half of it

Before the model sees a word of yours, StrainPack has already told it the shape of the label, that the artwork is flat printed artwork and not a photograph of a finished bag, that color runs off all four edges, where the strain name goes, the exact text that appears, that nothing important sits within an eighth of an inch of the trim, and that there are to be no barcodes, watermarks, hands or product mockups.

Which means these lines, all reasonable, are all wasted:

Square 3×3 label
Artwork only, not a photograph of a finished bag
Important elements inside generous print-safe margins
Text (verbatim): "GORILLA GLUE #4"
The only visible text may be "GORILLA GLUE #4."
Do not include: barcodes, weights, potency figures, warnings,
compliance text, signatures, or watermarks

Every one of those is in the prompt already, and the versions the builder writes are stricter than the hand-written ones. The text rule in particular: rather than naming what must not appear, it states the complete set of words that may appear at all, which rules out the things nobody thought to list.

Spend the box on what the builder cannot know: the subject, the material, the style, the palette and the mood. It knows the die-line. It does not know you want an ape.

What is actually worth writing

Here is a strong direction with the redundant half removed. It is doing five jobs, and every one of them is a thing only you know.

Feature an original anime gorilla as the central character. Powerful
build, confident expression, dynamic crouched pose. Completely
original — must not resemble an existing anime character, mascot or
commercial brand.

Make the illustration feel intensely sticky and resinous. Glossy
translucent resin strands stretched between the gorilla's fingers,
arms, surrounding leaves and dense flower clusters. Sparkling
trichomes, elastic golden-clear threads, tacky highlights, suspended
droplets. The substance should read as natural plant resin — not
household glue, slime, honey or melted plastic.

Dramatic Japanese anime key-art styling: bold inked contours, dynamic
foreshortening, detailed cel shading, controlled motion effects, a
polished collectible finish.

Deep emerald green, charcoal black, warm amber, icy white highlights.

Powerful, loud, sticky, premium. Strong silhouette that still reads at
thumbnail size.

• Subject, specifically. Not "a gorilla" but the build, the expression and the pose. Vague subjects come back generic because the model picks the average of everything it has seen.
• Material. The resin is half this design. Textures are the thing people most often leave out and most often wanted.
• Style, if you want to override the one you picked. The style you choose in the builder already supplies an art direction; naming a different one here replaces it, because your words outrank the style.
• Palette. Four or five named colors beat an adjective. "Deep emerald, charcoal, warm amber" is actionable; "earthy" is not.
• Mood, and how it must survive being small. A label is seen at thumbnail size on a shelf before it is seen in the hand.

The habit that makes a model draw the thing you forbade

This is worth more than the rest of this page. Telling an image model not to draw something puts that thing in the prompt, and models are much better at drawing a noun than at not drawing it.

A real example from this builder. Pre-roll wraps kept coming back as photographs of pre-roll tubes. The prompt said, in plain language, do not draw a tube — and three thousand characters earlier it had said the label "wraps around a thin cylinder, and the outer thirds curve away out of sight." That sentence was there to explain the layout. The model drew the cylinder. It was told to, vividly, and the prohibition three paragraphs later lost.

The fix was not a stronger prohibition. It was describing the layout without naming the object, and stating up front what the picture is: flat printed artwork, the surface itself. The mockups stopped.

• Say what is there, not what is absent. "A flat field of deep green" beats "no background clutter."
• The exception is disambiguation. "Natural plant resin, not household glue, slime or honey" works, because it is narrowing a genuine ambiguity rather than banning a subject. You are telling it which resin, not asking it to omit glue.
• Keep the prohibitions that are about rights, not looks. "Must not resemble an existing anime character or commercial brand" is worth its place, because the risk of getting it wrong is not aesthetic.

Two-word strain names get two subjects

The builder reads the strain name and adds an illustration subject from it, and it will take both halves of a compound name. Cherry Cola gets cherries and dark fizzing cola. Gorilla Glue gets stretching strands and a heavy-shouldered ape.

If you want one half to dominate, say so in the box. "The ape is the subject; the glue is texture on and around it" produces a different picture from letting both compete for the center.

Check the spelling before you finalize

Image models misspell display lettering, and doubled letters are where they fail. Four takes of one strain came back with two reading CHERY COLA — a word that looks right at a glance and is unusable on a product.

The builder now reads the words back off each finished image and flags a take whose lettering does not match the brief. Treat that as a prompt to look closely rather than as a verdict; it is a model reading a picture and it can be wrong in both directions.

Generate more than one

Even a good direction has a hit rate. Framing wanders, a pouch silhouette creeps in, a letter drops. Generating three or four takes of one brief and keeping the best one costs less than refining a prompt against a single sample, because you cannot tell from one image whether the brief or the roll was the problem.

The short version

• Delete anything about shape, margins, text or mockups. It is already there.
• Spend the space on subject, material, style, palette and mood.
• Describe what is present. Naming a thing to forbid it often summons it.
• Disambiguating a material is the exception, and it works.
• Say which half of a two-word name should lead.
• Generate several and choose.

The die-line pages list the arrangements that suit each shape, which is worth a look before writing direction for a wrap or a jar lid — those two have real constraints a bag face does not.