Illustrations are eye-catchingdynamicmemorableand most importantlythey narrate stories of our favorite characters in magical worlds.
They are a key element in the Entertainment Industryvisible in various formats—from movie posters and in-game character visuals to game loading screens and promotional campaigns.
They are simply everywhere!
Like most thingsthere 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 firstin this example we are going to make a landscape illustration from one of our sketches.
So we are going to select “Blank Canvas”.
Nextwe are going to change the default aspect ratio and choose “Landscape”
2. Sketching a base composition
FirstLet’s begin with a simple Sketch. It doesn’t need to be extremely detailedbut remember! The more specific we are with our inputsthe 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 Photoshopor because you want to reuse the example sketch
belowyou 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
3. Generating our first rendering
Now that our sketch is readywe can begin creating some renders!
Firstlet’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 inputwhile ‘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 examplewe will want to be very faithful to the intent of our sketchbut we want it to be fully rendered in an anime . so we will choose “Creative”.
Next we will enter a description for our desired outputhere we will use cabin in the mountainssunset in the backgroundanime .
A better way to control the of your renders is through Style References.
This will help you hone in on a specific without having to try to
describe it with words.
4. Generating variations and combining them
Our first generation is pretty goodbut it’s always nice to get a few more optionsand 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
- Adding details and making precise edits
Now that we’ve established a solid foundationwe can continue to refine our piece by adding extra elements. For instancewe can incorporate a waterfall in the background or depict smoke emerging from the chimney.
Howeverif we just regenerate our current imageeverything else will change as wellwhich is not what we ant.
Insteadwe 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 paintoversimply press shift+Enter to automatically re-render only the
sections within that layer. This eliminates the need to manually mask the
modified area.
