Medium — what it looks painted with
How far do medium tags like watercolour and oil carry on an anime model?
Medium tags say what the picture should look like it was made with. On danbooru the canonical spelling carries a parenthetical: watercolor (medium).
The quality prefix got in the way here as well. masterpiece, best quality, amazing quality, very awa pushed a polished anime render hard enough that the medium tags could not get through. Clearing it let them show.
Every cut below shares one seed, one base prompt and one sampler setting, and differs only by the tag marked in amber.
What each cut shows
watercolor (medium)- Colour thins and edges bleed. Lines weaken and the image reads as pigment spreading on paper.
oil painting (medium)- No brushstroke texture appeared. Instead the content changed — longer hair, torn jeans — and colour and contrast run deeper than in the watercolour cut.
traditional media- Takes the digital smoothness off without naming a specific material — a general nudge toward analogue.
greyscale- The background loses all colour, but a faint blue stays in the jeans and a warm tint in the eyes and skin. The biggest change of the four.
How these were made
Shared prompt
1girl, solo, mature female, adult woman, short black hair, brown eyes, white blouse, blue jeans, standing, park path, <tag slot>
Tap a tag to carry it over to the builder
Negative prompt
school uniform, pleated skirt, blazer, serafuku, child, loli, teenage, bad quality, worst quality, worst detail, censor, jpeg artifacts, watermark, signature, text, extra limbs, bad hands, bad anatomy
Model
rinFlanimeIllustrious_v30 · euler_ancestral/normal · steps 28 · CFG 5 · 896×1152 · seed 777003
Takeaway
To change the medium, drop the quality prefix. It pushes one particular finish, and that collides head-on with a medium instruction.
How far this result reaches
This checkpoint holds its anime rendering firmly. Watercolour and oil arrive as a texture over anime art, not as an actual painting.
Measured on a single Stable Diffusion family checkpoint. The same tags can behave differently on NovelAI, Midjourney or another checkpoint. This is a reference point, not a verdict.
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