Oil Pastel Portrait

Illustration · Oil Pastel · Crayon

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Oil Pastel Portrait, Waxy strokes, colour dragged over tooth, drawn like a child but not by one — Child in a hood·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 portrait of a child in a coral hood, drawn in oil pastel on textured paper. Thick waxy strokes that skip across the paper tooth, colours laid over one another without blending, a darker stick pushed in for the outline, small areas of bare paper left showing. Simplified proportions, slightly imperfect drawing, warm palette of coral, mustard and pale blue. Flat lighting, no shading beyond the colour layering.

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: 1024 x 1280
Quality: High
Background: Opaque
Output: PNG

Tips

1Strokes that skip across the tooth is the phrase that produces real pastel rather than smooth digital colour.
2Colours over one another without blending. Blending turns it into a painting.
3Slightly imperfect proportions. Perfect drawing kills the warmth.