The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

The Princess' Butterflies - By TET and Prome AI

Over 23 years ago I drew a very rough pen sketch to illustrate a scene from a story my partner and I were taking turns at writing, at the very beginnings of, what started out as a very long distance relationship.

My original hand drawn pen sketch
drawn over 23 years ago.

The original image has been sitting in a frame placed on display in the various houses we've lived in over the years. As I've gotten more into animation I've thought about progressing it to a finished artwork and then animating it.

It's one of those things I've just never gotten around to even though I have experimented with how I'd go about it from time to time.

Today I came across a text to image AI art generator, Prome AI that has this incredible feature called Sketch Rendering which you can try out yourself completely for free. They also have a number of other AI art tools like inpainting and out painting and more which you can explore.

The sketch rendering feature allows you to take any sketch and have the AI render it as a full color image in varying styles from photographic through to anime.

What's truly amazing is the four render modes that determine how closely the AI follows your outlines. Specifically the 'Outline' render mode seems to be the most precise, sticking to the outlines of my princess image almost perfectly. Which is quite impressive for how rough the sketch is.

I used the Outline mode with the 'Common Natural' style to generate my images.

It took twelve generations to arrive at two completely rendered images that I liked. One exactly rendered the princess how I'd always imagined her in a blue flowing dress. The other rendered the waterfall in the background almost exactly how I imagined it.

The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how
closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has
misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump.

I did try many more generations to see if I could get a perfect, single generation (and to try out some of the other render styles just to see what they would produce) but I really only kept getting endless variations that were close but not quite.

A couple of alternate renders of my sketch using different render modes
that are less strict on following the outlines of the sketch but still
retain the general idea of the prompt request and sketch.

I ended up downloading the two images I liked and manually merging them in Krita (my graphics software of choice) to get the final image that I feel is almost exactly what I had envisioned so many years ago.

Though having said that, the art style is so not my style that there was little chance I would have ever come up with this particular final render if I had tried painting it myself. It's too close to realistic illustration. My style is more cartoony and painterly.

However Prome AI is an impressive resource that is one way to fast track your own sketches to fully rendered art in seconds. I could definitely see myself using it in the future to bring more of my sketches to life as finished art.