Finding The Right Artist & Their Style

Creating a great prompt often means matching the style of a particular artist (or two) with the subject selected. For instance, if you're subject is "a busy city street", your output image can widely vary, depending on the artist called out. You may have noticed a few artists that are "built-in" to NightCafe's preset prompts. Those include Thomas Kinkade, Greg Rutkowski, Gustave Doré and WLOP (yep, that's an artist - real name: Wang Ling).

Here's some examples of these artists and styles: (clicking on each image will take you to a gallery of their works)

Thomas Kinkade (world renowned artist for - ethereal light filled whimsical landscape, cottages, gardens...)

copyright Thomas Kinkade

Greg Rutkowski - known for epic landscapes, dragons and other mythical beasts (think Dungeons & Dragons) and fantasy art.

Gustave Doré - 19th century French artist known for book illustrations, comics, engravings

WLOP - known for beautiful portraits of women, both fantasy style and more realistic.

Sunshine2 - copyright WLOP

Rutowski and WLOP are probably the most "style invoked" artists on NC, and are wildly popular on Artstation (have you seen that in a prompt? "trending on Artstation"... now you have a reference!)

Here's a few more artist and their styles you may have seen in a prompt (or should check out in order to expand your style reference library)

James Gurney - best described in the coined phrase "Imaginative Realism" - making things/creatures etc. that never really existed appear as if they did. Best know outside the NC realm for illustrations like his fantastical book Dinotopia.

image courtesy jamesgurney.com

Jacek Yerka - one of my favorite discoveries since joining NC, mostly because I love whimsical surrealism! Yerka is a Polish artist known for imaginative landscapes, fantastical creatures and "4siders" (they're fascinating, trust me)

City_is_Landing copyright Jacek Yerka

So what's the benefit about studying/understanding particular artists and their styles? In a nutshell: Because the Stable (Stable Diffusion, SD) algorithms already recognize hundreds, if not thousands of artists & styles. Find the one (or two) that you think best suits the image you're attempting to create, and you have a much better rate of success from the get-go!

There's another benefit as well : Complementary styles. Meaning combining complementary artists/styles can often bring out the best each has to offer. It also works in reverse at times. If you combine an artist/style that is futuristic with neon colors, with an artist that is known for muted pastoral landscapes, chances are you're going to negate the most prominent features of that particular artists' style. There are "happy accidents" tho' along with many lamenting their "epic fails".

There are also occasionally "anomalies"... images that defy all those who've attempted to pontificate on the rhyme and reason of Stable algorithms when it comes to styles. Sometimes, the SUBJECT alone can dictate the end result... and sometimes it can be a "masterpiece"! Example:

This is one of my favorite creations... and yet there is no "style" applied. The prompt was literally just a slight variation of this as the subject: amethyst geodes on display in a museum. I tweaked that several times to come up with a series of images, HOWEVER, while I could add or change the color of the geodes or what they were displayed on, the minute I took out the "on display in a..." portion my results "magically" went back to something good, but not spectacular. Kinda like Cinderella after that glass slipper was gone...

We'll talk more about styles in future posts, but for now, enjoy the experimenting!

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