Nord - Engel - Illustrious V2

This LoRA captures the raw, kinetic, and pencil-heavy art style of comic book artist Cary Nord. It is trained to replicate his signature "direct-to-color" aesthetic, where the roughness of the pencil lines remains visible, giving generations a gritty, organic, and highly expressive feel. And yes, I am using AI to generate a description because I'm lazy and I know nobody reads this shit. Cry about it, I don't care. Either way, I hope this comes out well and people like it. If not, oh well.

What This Model Does

This model applies a distinct "sketchy" texture to your generations. It moves away from smooth, plastic-looking digital art and leans into:

• Heavy Pencil Textures: Visible cross-hatching and graphite textures.

• Dynamic Anatomy: Exaggerated musculature and movement typical of modern dynamic comics.

• Atmospheric Lighting: High-contrast shadowing often found in noir or dark fantasy settings.

What It Is Good At (Best Use Cases)

• Dark Fantasy & Barbarians: Naturally, this model shines with Conan-esque themes—fur, steel, grime, and battlefields.

• Gritty Superheroes: Think street-level heroes (like Daredevil) rather than bright, glossy capes.

• Action Scenes: Nord’s style is fluid; this LoRA handles mid-combat poses well without looking stiff.

• Sketch/Traditional Media styles: excellent for prompting "pencil sketch" or "graphite" artworks.

What It Is Bad At (Limitations)

• Clean/Vector Art: If you want flat colors, thick clean lines, or a "corporate vector" look, this model will fight you.

• Anime/Kawaii: It struggles with the large eyes and smooth skin typical of anime models; it will try to add grit and muscle definition where you might not want it.

• Photorealism: While it handles lighting well, the texture is inherently illustrative.

Recommended Settings

• Trigger Word: crynrd-eng

• LoRA Weight: 0.6 - 0.8 (At 1.0, the pencil texture may become too noisy; lower it to mix with other styles).

• CFG Scale: 4 - 7

• Clip Skip: 2 (Standard for most anime/comic checkpoints)

Example Tags to Try

(Use these to help activate the style)

rough_sketch, pencil_(medium), traditional_media,

Also, try removing quality tags if things are coming out too clean. Also, I found best results with a CFG of 7 and tweaking the LoRA strength. It can take some finessing but I think there's some great potential with this LoRA.

How Not To Use It

Don't use this LoRA if you are trying to generate "clean" line art for coloring books. The model introduces a lot of inherent "noise" (pencil shading) that makes the image look finished and textured, which is difficult to color flatly.