Illustrator's guide to Alpaca
Introduction to AI rendering with Alpaca for illustration workflows
Illustrations are eye-catching, dynamic, memorable, and most importantly, they narrate stories of our favorite characters in magical worlds. They are a key element in the Entertainment Industry, visible in various formats—from movie posters and in-game character visuals to game loading screens and promotional campaigns. They are simply everywhere!
Like most things, there isn’t just one way to create an illustration! Here are some basic techniques you can use to start integrating Alpaca into your illustration workflow.
1. Setting up our workspace
First things first, in this example we are going to make a landscape illustration from one of our sketches. So we are going to select “Blank Canvas”.
Next, we are going to change the default aspect ratio and choose “Landscape”
2. Sketching a base composition
First, Let’s begin with a simple Sketch. It doesn’t need to be extremely detailed, but remember! The more specific we are with our inputs, the better and more tailored results we will get from Alpaca! This is because Alpaca is trained to respect the intent of your inputs.
You can easily paste images to your Alpaca’s canva: whether because you prefer
sketching in Adobe Photoshop, or because you want to reuse the example sketch
below, you can simply copy the image you want and paste it in Alpaca (ctrl+v
or cmd+v on Mac) and it will automatically be copied to your canvas
Our base sketch
3. Generating our first rendering
Now that our sketch is ready, we can begin creating some renders!
First, let’s decide the extent to which we want Alpaca to render our sketch. Are we aiming for a light touch-up or a full render?
This can be easily managed through the presets: ‘Pro’ will generate an image very similar to the input, while ‘Wild’ will yield a generation that is very different.
Check out our Render Settings guide to learn about Presets and settings to control your rendering in Alpaca.
For this example, we will want to be very faithful to the intent of our sketch, but we want it to be fully rendered in an anime style. so we will choose “Creative”.
Next we will enter a description for our desired output, here we will use cabin in the mountains, sunset in the background, anime style.
A better way to control the style of your renders is through Style References. This will help you hone in on a specific style without having to try to describe it with words.
Our first generation
4. Generating variations and combining them
Our first generation is pretty good, but it’s always nice to get a few more options, and take what we like from each to make a stronger final results
Don’t forget to import a generation you like in a new layer by clicking
Import before re-generating so you don’t lose it
Combining various part of a few generations.
- Adding details and making precise edits
Now that we’ve established a solid foundation, we can continue to refine our piece by adding extra elements. For instance, we can incorporate a waterfall in the background or depict smoke emerging from the chimney. However, if we just regenerate our current image, everything else will change as well, which is not what we ant.
Instead, we can paint over our existing image and use the Generation Mask to highlight the parts of the image we want to re-render.
A quicker method is to create a new layer for our paint over. After completing the paintover, simply press shift+Enter to automatically re-render only the sections within that layer. This eliminates the need to manually mask the modified area.
And here is the result:
Our final result.
And we’re done! Or are we? Alpaca is designed to enhance your workflow. So, where you want to take things is entirely up to you!