Line and colouring
Can a tag change how the lines and the colouring are handled?
Medium picks the material; this axis picks the method. Within the same digital drawing, lines can be uniform or modulated, and shading can have two steps or twenty.
Only three are shown, because only three made a visible difference in this category.
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
ligne claire- Uniform line weight, flat colour and crisp outlines; the shading stays, but as hard-edged flat shapes instead of gradients. A European comics term the model knows well.
flat color- Cel-style colouring: fewer gradients, simpler blocks of colour.
1980s (style)- Retro anime inking and palette. The most distinct of the three.
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
A tag that names a decade worked better than abstract style names, most likely because dated captions are common in the training data.
How far this result reaches
Style names like Webtoon and Shonen_manga drew almost no response — they seem to overlap with the model's default style and add nothing.
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.
Related comparisons
Medium — what it looks painted with
How far do medium tags like watercolour and oil carry on an anime model?
Style tags this model ignores
Are there tags that simply do nothing when you type them?
Does stacking quality tags actually help?
Does adding masterpiece, best quality and amazing quality make the picture better?