I highly recommend checking out diffusion networks for image generation. It's hard to put in words the difference between diffusion and something like VQGAN, but the images have a much more organic quality. Here's a mish-mash of images [1] I generated recently. A few (like the bears) used initial images to get the process started, but most are from just a text prompt (the large image of the dog at the bottom right was the result of using another network to upscale one of the outputs).

The results need to be cherry picked, but I'm frequently surprised by the good images. For instance, after some attempts I got this nightmarish result for "my neighbor totoro" [2].

edit: It can also be very satisfying to see the process unfold throughout the iterations, starting from noise and eventually settling on a very convincing imaging [3].

https://ibb.co/6mNTMjH [1] N.B: Probably SFW, but some images are oddly disturbing

https://ibb.co/7KCvXPG [2]

https://imgur.com/a/HEBM0uq [3]