Renaissance Portrait

Illustration · Oil Painting · Chiaroscuro

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Renaissance Portrait, Oil on panel, one window of light and four hundred years of varnish — Three quarter portrait, dark ground·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 oil on panel portrait in the northern Renaissance manner. A sitter in a dark velvet gown turned three quarters toward a single window on the left, hands resting on a stone ledge, flat dark green background. Thin glazed skin tones over a warm underpainting, precise rendering of embroidered sleeve detail, restrained expression. Fine craquelure across the surface, yellowed varnish, slight panel warp, photographed straight on in a museum.

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

1Craquelure and yellowed varnish are what separate a painting from a digital illustration.
2Name the light source once and let everything else follow from it.
3Ask for a restrained expression. Modern models want to add a smile.