A style LoRA for the painted marker and watercolor illustrations of Hidenori Matsubara, the artist behind the Sakura Wars key art and artbooks. It goes for his traditional painted look: layered marker strokes, soft watercolor washes, matte skin, and his 1990s face shapes. It does not target the clean cel-shaded style.

Trigger: mtsbr
Recommended strength: 1.0
Base: Anima Base v1.0. Tested mostly on rdbt, and it holds its style on finetunes at 1.0.

Recommended settings

• Sampler: Euler + Normal (Shift 3) or Euler a + Simple

• CFG: 3–4

• Steps: ~28

• Resolution: 832x1216 works well. For full-body shots, use hires fix 1.5x with Lanczos or 4x-AnimeSharp at denoise 0.35–0.45.

• Img2img and inpainting: set Shift to 1. At Shift 3, denoise hits much harder than the number suggests.

Prompting tips

• 1990s \(style\) helps the faces.

• traditional media adds more paint texture.

• muted colors helps if night or festival scenes come out too saturated.

• marker (medium) helps enforce the hand drawn style

• Skip quality tags like masterpiece and best quality. They push toward glossy digital rendering, the opposite of this style.

• Turn off detail enhancer extensions. They smooth out the paint texture.

• For multiple characters, describe each outfit in a sentence linked to hair color, for example: "The girl with long black hair wears a pink kimono, a blue obi and a red hakama." The LoRA was trained on captions written this way, so it follows them well.

Suggested negative:
worst quality, low quality, blurry, lowres, bad hands, watermark, shiny skin, airbrush, glossy, 3d

Avoid soft shading and gradient in the negative. They suppress the watercolor look.

Known quirks

• Three or more named canon characters in one image can blend together. Two characters work reliably.

• If you don't specify an obi color, it leans toward blue, because there's a lot of Sakura in the training data.

• For characters with several outfits, describe the one you want. Otherwise the model may mix them.

• Simple, strong designs (Sonic, mascots) keep their flat look. The style shows mostly in the scenery unless you add traditional media.

Training details

• Trained on base anima

• Captions: WD EVA02 tags plus character names, plus a sentence describing each character's outfit and colors. This was done to stop outfit details, like Sakura's blue obi bow, from leaking into the trigger word.

Support the artist

This LoRA is free and will stay free. If you enjoy Matsubara's style, check out his Sakura Wars artbooks and official work as well as the games. Sega sure as hell won't keep bringing this series over to the west if we don't support it.