Dithered Old Master

Illustration · Dither · Classical

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Dithered Old Master, A classical landscape redrawn in the few colours an old display could manage — Dome above the gardens·Nano Banana Pro

Recipe

The style is the recipe. The subject is yours.

The examples above were generated with Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.5. The recipes below are written for GPT Image and Flux, so treat the settings as a starting point rather than the exact run.

A description in plain sentences. This is the version to start with, and it works on any current image model. Settings below are the ones we used on GPT Image; treat them as a starting point.

Make it yours

The recipe is the style, not the picture. Put your own subject in and the highlighted part of the prompt changes.

Prompt

A neoclassical oil painting of a domed stone building above formal gardens with small figures working in the foreground, rendered as though displayed on hardware that could only hold a handful of colours. The sky is a deep saturated ultramarine broken into a fine crosshatched ordered dither that thickens through every gradient, clouds reduced to clumped dot clusters. Architecture keeps its carved detail, greens quantise into flat bands, and a few vertical streaks run down from the top edge as though the image smeared while loading. Limited indexed palette, full bleed, no frame, no text.

The prompt gets you close. Feed one of the examples in as a style reference for the rest. Download the images

Use the examples as a reference

Download the examples

Send the example as an input image to the images.edits endpoint alongside the prompt, or attach it in ChatGPT. It follows composition closely, so describe your subject firmly or it will copy the example.

Settings on GPT Image

Size: 1536 x 1024
Quality: High
Background: Opaque
Output: PNG

Tips

1The sky carries the effect. Ask for the dither to thicken through the gradient there and stay lighter on solid detail.
2Say indexed or limited palette. Without it the colour stays smooth and the dithering has nothing to do.
3Keep the painting itself straight and classical. The tension comes from old subject against old hardware.

Overview

A neoclassical painting, a domed building above formal gardens, figures at work in the foreground, rendered as though loaded on hardware that could only hold a handful of colours. The sky takes the worst of it, a deep ultramarine broken into a fine crosshatched dither that thickens through every gradient, while the architecture keeps its detail and the greens quantise into flat bands. Occasional vertical streaks run down from the top edge where the image seems to have smeared on the way in.

Category: Illustration
Period: Contemporary
Recipes: GPT Image, Flux
Views: 126
Added: 17 Aug 2026