The following is a guide to style options that you can use to get interesting results with Stable Diffusion (examples using own model, but similar results are possible with most 1.5 and SDXL checkpoints).

Painting Styles

The four main painting styles I find useful are Impressionistic, Oil Paint, Watercolor, and Gouache.

Impressionistic gives a nice loose style, with some visible brushwork. It offers great results for mood based pieces, where you want more focus on the composition over the detail. I also find that it works very well for areas where you might want to mask some of the rendering limiations of the model. A character with impressionistic hands, is far less obviously flawed, than one with photo-realistic hands.

Oil paint offers similar results, but has a bit of a tighter feel to it.

Watercolor has the nice soft look of the medium, and gouache offers a somwhat stronger varient with more opaques.

Impressionisitc

Oil Paint

Watercolor

Gouache

Photographic Styles

There are several ways to get interesting photographic styles. The basic prompt of photograph gives a clean modern looking image with rich color. One of my favourite varients is the Cinematic Shot style, which offers a more muted tone and feel, that draws from classic Hollywood shots. The polaroid style is a nice way to get a vintage and nostalgic feel to the images, and this can be pushed further with the vintage photograph style.

Photograph

Cinematic Shot

Polaroid

Vintage Photograph

Drawing Styles

The model can handle various drawing styles too. From pencil and ink sketches, to cartoon illustrations. These can offer a lot of character to your generations.

Pencil Drawing

Ink Comic Book Illustration

Colored Pencil Drawing

Simple Cartoon

Evocative Themes

We can also use more evocative themes to get a specific kind of image. In these next examples we use the styles of ‘dreamscape’ and ‘nightmare’ to adjust the image content to a more fantastical feel. These images tend to have a very strong emotive feel to them, as well as adding in more detail to bring about the style effects. We see a castle added into our dreamscape image, while we get the barren rocky valley in our nightmare image. Note, however, that the iamge still largely coheres to our core prompt. We still have a beautiful image with red flowers in the foreground. Albeit one that has been adjusted to the specific emotional context of the prompt we’ve added.

Dreamscape

Nightmare