Changing Your Art Style
What happens to pages you have already illustrated when you switch art styles, and how to keep a book in one look
Pick the Style Before You Illustrate
Art styles are not filters laid over the same picture. Each one draws from scratch, and some of them draw in genuinely different media: Soft Realism paints your cast, Realistic photographs them. A page drawn in one style and a page drawn in the other will not sit together in the same book, no matter how good each one is on its own.
So the cheapest moment to choose is at the start, before any page has been illustrated. Changing later is supported, and the rest of this page is about doing it cleanly.
What Happens When You Switch Midway
Changing the style does not redraw the art you already have. Finished pages keep the look they were drawn in, and only new pages come out in the new style. Left alone, that gives you a book that is part one style and part another.
The app watches for this. When you pick a new style on a book that already has illustrations, you will see "Regenerate in new style?", telling you how many existing images are in the old style. Choose Regenerate and every illustrated page and cover is marked for redraw, so your next run brings the whole book across at once.
If you dismiss that dialog, nothing is marked and the mixed look stays until you redraw the pages yourself.
Redraw the Cover Too
This is the part that catches people out.
The cover is the reference the interior pages match themselves to. When a page is drawn, the cover goes along as the guide for how the book is supposed to look. That means a cover left in the old style quietly pulls new pages back toward it, and you can redraw the same page several times without it settling.
So when you change styles, include the cover in the redraw. If you are working through pages one at a time, do the cover first and the pages after it.
Checking It Worked
Open the book and scroll it end to end, cover included. You are looking for one thing: does every page look like it came from the same illustrator? Colour and lighting will vary page to page, and that is normal. A change of medium is not, so a painted page sitting next to a photographic one means something was missed in the redraw.
If one page keeps coming back in the old look after the rest have moved, redraw the cover once more, then that page.
Custom Styles
Styles you create yourself behave the same way. The style's reference image sets the medium, so swapping between two custom styles, or between a custom style and a built-in one, is the same kind of change as any other and wants the same full redraw.
Related
- Fixing an Illustration That Came Out Wrong. Reverting is free, and worth doing before you spend a redraw.
- When Characters Look Different Between Pages, for problems that follow one character rather than the whole book.