Cinnabar Sulk

Dark gothic watercolour painting: pale blue-skinned figures with sulky, half-lidded red eyes, huge horned shadow creatures looming behind them, black ink smoke, stripes, checks and skulls, all washed over a fiery red-orange ground.

Trained on Krea 2 Raw from 43 of my own Midjourney images, rank 32, 2000 steps.

How to prompt

There's no trigger word. The training captions were long natural-language descriptions in a fixed order, so the style responds to that kind of prompt, not to a keyword. Short prompts barely move it.

Write 150 to 200 words in this order:

1. Open with: "This is a digital painting in a dark, surreal, and slightly gothic style."

2. Describe the character: skin, hair, one distinguishing detail, pose.

3. Describe the eyes in a sentence of their own (see below).

4. Describe any creature, then the clothes, then the setting.

5. Close with these three sentences, word for word:

"The background is a fiery, red-orange gradient with rough, textured brushstrokes. The overall color palette is dominated by red, black, and blue, creating a stark, dramatic contrast. The texture of the painting is rough, with visible brushstrokes and a watercolor-like finish."

Eyes

"Red eyes" on its own gives flat, glowing eyes with no pupils, because that's how the creatures in the set were drawn. For characters, use:

"Her eyes are half-lidded, with deep red irises, small black pupils and a tiny white catchlight in each, rimmed with smudged dark red eye makeup."

Keep "glowing red eyes" for the creatures.

Example prompt

This is a digital painting in a dark, surreal, and slightly gothic style. This is a close-up portrait of a young woman with pale blue skin, long white hair and a small black beauty mark high on one cheekbone, wearing a crown of thin black candles set into her hair, their red wax dripping down through the strands. Her eyes are half-lidded, with deep red irises, small black pupils and a tiny white catchlight in each, rimmed with smudged dark red eye makeup, and her expression is calm and melancholic. She wears a high black lace collar fastened with a large black skull button. Thin curls of candle smoke drift up and around her head. The background is a fiery, red-orange gradient with rough, textured brushstrokes. The overall color palette is dominated by red, black, and blue, creating a stark, dramatic contrast. The texture of the painting is rough, with visible brushstrokes and a watercolor-like finish.

Settings

- Weight 1.0 on Raw, 1.1 to 1.3 on Turbo. If the creatures' glowing eyes start spreading onto your characters, lower it.

- Portrait works best. The training set was all portrait.

- For landscape, start at 3:2. Put the character on one side and the creature or scene on the other, and say so in the prompt ("On the left... On the right..."). Otherwise you may get a duplicated figure or an empty edge.

Tips

- Leave out photo words like "photograph", "realistic" or lens terms. They pull Krea back to its default look.

- Keep a character in the picture. Landscapes and objects on their own get a weaker effect.

- Stripes, checked fabric, skulls or a looming creature give the style something to attach to. One or two is enough.

- You may get scribbled lettering in a bottom corner, because the training images had fake signatures. Crop it or inpaint it out.

Example images include full prompts and seeds.