Personal merge based on Counterfeit 3.0 I've been using for a while (You can check more polished examples on my pixiv page). Sadly, after many add-ons, the recipe is lost in time like tears in the rain.

This model is focused on stylization and lora compatibility. Can't say exactly it's beginner friendly nor hard to use, you just have to prompt exactly what you want like outline, shading/lighting, and aesthetic/artist to keep consistency (by "artist" tags will give you some watermarks, so bear with it). It's pretty good for pastel/watercolor/oil painting without blowing everything up, try mixing and matching to find your preferred style!

Personal recommended sampler is ancestral Euler, but other samples will also give you nice results and different styles. If your image looks fried, just crank up the steps, if it's looking like a tumor, lower the steps, pretty intuitive:
CFG Scale: 5~10/ More to Less stylization and Softer to Sharper
Euler/2S a Karras/Restart: <25 steps / Lower denoising
K Samplers: 30~40 steps / Higher denoising

Upscalers: R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B/4x-AnimeSharp

VAE: DogeVAE

These examples are not cherry picked or inpainted, you can get better results or worse, who knows...