Topless Velociraptor

AI Art, Prompt Engineering 101, and Dinosaur Bosoms

Including

The Top Five Best Artist Styles Resources for Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dream by WOMBO

And

The Top Ten Best Eye Prompts for Stable Diffusion, Dream by WOMBO, and Wombot

AIs suck at eyes 

Ask anyone what Artificial Intelligence text-to-image programs are absolute pants at, and they will say… well, they’ll say “drawing hands.” Or possibly “knowing how many limbs the typical human body has.” 

BONUS GRAMMAR PRECISION TIP: Note that I say the typical body here, and not the average body. The differing human limb to body ratios for each is a great way to remember why the two words are not interchangeable. The typical human body has four limbs. The average human body contains slightly more than four. That’s because some women’s bodies have twice as many limbs as a typical person. Some can have three or four times as many, or even more!

This woman looks like someone poured whiteout into her eyes. her body has four arms and four legs - because she is pregnant!
Which is scarier, the eyes or the 8 limbs?

But ask anyone who has ever tried to generate a woman with eight arms and legs what body part AIs blow the second largest amount of chunks upon, and the typical and average prompter will say eyes



When I started making text-to-image artwork using the free Dream app by WOMBO and especially when I upgraded to WOMBO’s fuller-featured Wombot on their Discord server, my characters’ eyes blew copious chunks. 

In medium and full body shots, eyes  looked warped, or melted, or like they had been scratched out by Exacto knives. Even at their best in closeups, they would look dead inside unless I wrote “beautiful eyes” at the very start of my prompt.

“Beautiful eyes” is probably the phrase I use more than any other in my prompts – a quick fix that makes eyes look great in closeups, even if it doesn’t always help much in wide shots. I learned it on one of my first visits to the super-helpful Prompt Masters channel on WOMBO’s Discord server, and for a while, it was my best and only trick. 

Then I discovered Ilya Kuvshinov. 

At some point had gotten my hands on a small chunk of LAION-5B, the database of artwork that Stable Diffusion used as its training data. I only had the artists from John William Godward to Patrick Nagel, and there were only two examples of each artist’s work, but it opened a whole new world of promptcraft for me. 

Like most people at the time, I blindly added phrases like “in the style of Greg Rutkowski, Trending on Artstation and CGSociety” to my prompts like a shibboleth: secret words of power that we believed would magically improve our prompts, even if no one knew what they meant. 

Now I was no longer blind – with detailed examples from every artist that Stable Diffusion knew (G-N), I could take a reasonable guess as to how Wombot would interpret a prompt for a “British ninja assassin in the style of John William Godward” or a “catgirl ninja assassin by Patrick Nagel.”

Unfortunately, although I love both of their art styles, the eyes they generate in Stable Diffusion, Dream, and Wombot are crap. “by John William Godward” generates women with eyes that look okay from a technical standpoint, but are either vacant or filled with a wistful, confused sadness, as if they know that Godward killed himself in 1922, leaving a suicide note that read, “the world is not big enough for myself and Picasso.”  

“In the style of Patrick Nagel” generates great eyes, but only if the face is pressed flat against the virtual camera. Which is not unheard of for Nagle.

But take two steps back, and the eyes get really funky really fast.

Determined to find a non-crap art style for eyes, I methodically worked my way through through the rest of Godward-Nagel. Margaret Keane, the artist behind those kitschy paintings of big-eyed children, was tempting. The eyes sure would be big… but who knows what weird side effects paintings of children could have on my characters. 



Then, just a few artists past Keane, I was struck by two pictures of women with amazing eyes. One I vaguely recognized from a Ghost in the Shell spinoff TV series. Her eyes were smaller than normal for an anime, just a little bigger than human, with oversized round irises that looked intense without being cartoonish. 

The other woman, a girl really, had the best eyes of anyone in Godward-Nagel. Deep brown, almost black, but with a depth and spark to them. Ultra-realistic, but with a hint of Anime roundness. Truly striking. Luckily for me, both pictures were by the same artist: a Russian named Ilya Kuvshinov.



I tried “beautiful eyes by Ilya Kuvshinov” in the Nagel prompt that looked great in ultra close up but appeared broken at any other distance. The difference was amazing. Eyes that had been smeary, scribbled, or gone entirely were now perfectly defined, and seemed to stare through the screen right at me. Even on one of Nagel’s flat, dispassionate faces, the eyes gave off a sense of deep emotion – an emotion I couldn’t quite name. 

The blue-haired woman is back, and staring into my soul. She can see the future with those eyes, along with what I ate for breakfast in a past life.

The eye prompt affected the rest of the face as well, subtly giving it a youthful glow while somehow making it seem more serious as well. Maybe that’s a lot to read into a few pixels on the screen, but whatever “in the style of Ilya Kuvshinov” was doing, I liked it. 

There was only one problem with Ilya Kuvshinov: he wasn’t dead. 



In response to the stories of artists who felt their styles were being stolen by AIs that were after their jobs, I had adopted a personal rule: I only use dead artists in my prompts. And only if they have been dead for a respectful period of time – snagging their style right after they die seems a bit like grave robbing. Or a loving homage. You be you.

But I just couldn’t quit Ilya Kuvshinov. My eyes had been too crappy for too long. I tried to find a dead alternative, but even the old masters couldn’t beat Ilya Kuvshinov when it came to eyes. And I didn’t want all my characters to have pearl earrings. A little too “Something About Mary” for me. When the Voices in My Head Whose Job It Is to Point Out My Every Flaw complained that I was the worst kind of hypocrite by breaking a rule I had made up myself, I equivocated. I was just fixing one tiny yet crucial detail; It’s not like I was Greg Rutkowski-izing whole images like the real “style thieves.” They corrected Themselves, and said that equivocation was the worst kind of hypocrisy. Never a dull moment with Them.

If only I had known that The Curse of Ilya Kuvshinov’s Eyes was coming to punish my hypocrisy.

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