Velvet Mourning

作者：privatewolf

Velvet Mourning | Krea 2

Gothic storybook illustration in ink line and muted washes. The palette is olive, dark teal, cream, mustard and black, with red saved for a gown, a curtain or an imp. Women have long narrow faces, heavy lids, long noses and dark plum lips, and they usually look like they know something you don't. The scenes are cluttered Victorian parlours, libraries, kitchens, graveyards and candlelit balls, and something small and unearthly is nearly always nearby: a gargoyle on the chair back, an imp on the arch, a cat on the shoulder. Trigger word: l4rs0n

How to use it

Start every prompt with l4rs0n, and write the rest the way the training captions read. Each caption is one plain paragraph of content: who is there and what they're doing, the face, the hair, the clothes, then the props and setting. None of them has style, medium or lighting words, and the LoRA works best when yours don't either. "Ink illustration" or "watercolour" pulls Krea toward its own idea of those, not toward this set. Template:

l4rs0n, [WHO], a young woman in her early twenties, [DOING WHAT, WHERE]. She has [SKIN] skin, a [long narrow / round / oval] face, [EYE COLOUR] eyes under heavy lids, [ONE FEATURE OF THE BROWS OR NOSE] and [LIP COLOUR] lips in [EXPRESSION]. Her [HAIR]. She wears [GOWN OR DRESS AND ONE OR TWO DETAILS]. [A SMALL CREATURE AND WHERE IT SITS.] [THREE OR FOUR PROPS AND THE ROOM OR LANDSCAPE.]

Example:

l4rs0n, in an attic studio, a young painter in her early twenties stands at a tall easel with a brush in her right hand and a wooden palette in her left, giving a flat, unimpressed look sideways. She has light brown skin, a long face, dark eyes under heavy lids, thick straight brows, a long nose and dark plum lips pulled to one side. Her black hair is tied up in a loose knot with a pencil through it. She wears a mustard-gold smock spattered with paint over a black dress, with the sleeves rolled up. On the stone windowsill two small grey stone gargoyles with bat wings sit posing. A third has climbed down onto her paint table and sits licking a pot of red paint. A slanted ceiling, rolled canvases, jars of brushes and a round window with a grey sky.

Settings

Krea 2 Turbo: weight 1.0, 8 steps, guidance 1. If a render comes out photographic or glossy, raise the weight to 1.25 on the same seed before changing the prompt. Krea 2 Base: start at 0.8 to 1.0. Most of the set is 4:5, so 1024 × 1280 suits it best. 2:3 at 896 × 1344 works for full-length figures.

Tips

• Furnish the room. The training pictures almost never show a figure on a bare wall, so give her a sofa, a window, curtains, a candle or a shelf of books. A figure described as "small in the frame" gets a lot of empty wall.
• Add one small creature and say where it is: on the chair back, on her shoulder, on top of the arch. The set uses imps, gargoyles, goblins, owls, bats and black cats this way.
• Animals held in the arms tend to float. In two tests Krea wouldn't put a cat in a woman's arms with this LoRA, but "perches on her shoulder" worked first time.
• Keep the palette in the set's range. Bright or pastel colours in the prompt fight the washes, so write "dusty pale blue" instead of "sky blue" and "faded navy" instead of "navy".
• Describe each face with one quirk in the brows, nose or mouth, such as arched brows, a slightly upturned nose tip or lips pulled to one side. The set's own "pointed chin" sometimes gives a pinched face, so leave it out if that happens.
• Count the hands. Give each one a job, like a teacup, a brush or a hand on the book, so none of them floats.
• Fine fabric words like "tulle", "toile" or "lace edging" can pull a render toward a photograph. "Ruffles", "lace sleeves" and "a lace collar" are safe, since the captions use them.
• Krea ignores negative prompts at guidance 1. To keep something out, describe what should be there instead.

Training

32 hand-picked images, each captioned by hand with content only: framing, faces, clothes, creatures, props and setting, with no style or light words. 28 show one or two figures, and four are crowds: a ball, a masquerade, a feast and a procession. Trained on Krea 2 Base with Civitai's trainer, released at epoch 10. [Add steps, dim, alpha, LR and optimiser.]