Medieval Woodcut Illumination

Illustration · Woodcut · Medieval

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Medieval Woodcut Illumination, Hand coloured woodcut with symbols, borders and cheerfully wrong anatomy — Wheel of fortune scene·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 Midjourney, 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

An early printed woodcut illustration, hand coloured. A great wheel with an eye at its centre surrounded by small symbolic creatures, clouds and stars, drawn as a carved black outline with cross hatched shading. Flat hand applied colour in ochre, dull red and sage that strays outside the lines in places. Symbolic rather than accurate perspective, confident naive figure drawing, a decorative ruled border with small emblems in the corners. Toned foxed paper.

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: 1365 x 1024
Quality: High
Background: Opaque
Output: PNG

Tips

1Colour straying outside the lines is the detail that proves it was coloured by hand after printing.
2Symbolic perspective, meaning scale by importance rather than distance.
3Cross hatching does the shading. No tonal washes.