Aquarelle - A Vintage Anime Watercolor & Ink Style [ILL/ANIMA]

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A hand-painted illustration style LoRA drawn from the 1970s–80s anime and sci-fi fantasy era. Think ink line meets watercolor wash; loose, expressive, and unmistakably analog.

Aquarelle naturally renders characters with mature, expressive faces reflecting the full age range of its dataset. This is intentional. If you want younger results, add young to your positives. If you want older results, add young to your negatives and elderly, aged to your positives.

Trigger word: aquarelle - place it first, before everything else.

Recommended checkpoint: Ramthrust Pink Alchemy (for Illustrious version). Ramthrust preserves the ink linework and watercolor wash that define the style, while still pulling in a more modernized direction. You can play around with checkpoints, the style reacts differently to each. Comparison for my three recommendations below:

Other Illustrious recommendations: DaSiWa's Epitaph Ecstacy, Janku Trained + Checkin & Noob AI + Rouwei Illustrious XL

Suggested Illustrious Settings:

Euler A - Beta57 or Karras
CFG 5.0–5.2
28–30 steps
LoRA weight 0.85–1.0

Tips & Tricks: (Illustrious)

1980s or 1970s in your prompt actively anchors the era and pulls the most authentic vintage illustration quality out of the LoRA. Highly recommended.

eye focus unlocks a surrealist mode - cosmic, introspective compositions with detailed eye imagery.

Short prompts outperform long ones. Five to eight tags is the sweet spot.

human, human face, human body in positives and animal, creature, beast, snout in negatives if you're getting unexpected non-human results. The LoRA reads descriptors very literally.

Aquarelle tends to get absorbed by other strong style LoRAs. It pairs best with character or concept LoRAs rather than competing style LoRAs.

Negative prompt: (Illustrious)
worst quality, low quality, blurry, extra fingers, extra digits, malformed hands, bad anatomy, distorted face, deformed face, 3d, realistic, photorealistic, render, cgi, glossy, modern, contemporary

All gallery images generated straight from ComfyUI. No post processing, upscaling or inpainting (except where noted).

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ANIMA VERSION:

Triggerword: Aquarelle, @Aquarelle

This is a port of the original Illustrious Aquarelle style to Anima's Cosmos architecture. Same watercolor-and-ink wash aesthetic, different backbone - and a different set of rules to get it looking right.

You need the Anima Turbo LoRA for this to work. Tested across four combinations of sampler, schedule, and step count at base resolution - none of them produced the wash. Base Anima renders this style as hard cel fills, flat and graphic, (if that's what you're chasing, then perfect! lol) nothing close to the pigment bleed the style is built around. Turn on Turbo at 0.75 weight and the wash shows up immediately. Turbo isn't an optimization here, it's a requirement.

Recommended settings:

Anima Turbo LoRA: 0.75 weight (required for style to fire as it's meant to)

CFG: 1

Steps: 12

Sampler: Euler / Simple

Skip quality tags - the negative prompt is already baked into the Turbo distillation, adding your own won't do much

If you can't stack the Turbo LoRA for whatever reason, Euler/linear_quadratic at base gets you partway there - some atmospheric falloff, a bit of mottled texture, but no true pigment bleed.

Recommended Checkpoint: DaSiWa Anima Obsidian Archives V2