>>11307865
I have a bunch of favorite checkpoints that I start with, seeing which one works the best for the subject and maintain a style I'm after.
Adjusting loras weight once I found the one checkpoint to continue with.
I prefer it to not set the style in stone at this first stage, like webm related, you can see how blurry and broken the first gen is. This just means I got more power to tweak the style in the upscaling after I've puzzled several different gens together in photoshop.

The loras mostly decide how good it will all work. They're like spices in a dish, the checkpoint being the base dish, like a chicken filet.
I go through all the new stuff uploaded on civitai and keep a lookout for unique things.
So far the best ones to bruteforce my way out of the digital look is:
https://civitai.com/models/616752/as-lora-fantasy-traditional-painting-pony
https://civitai.com/models/836010/pindoodle
And recently I found these two artists: (kitamurashu, torogao:1.5)

I go for a low cfg, 1.5 is the breakpoint to where Negative Prompts work. For sketch>i2i the denoise and steps matter a lot, trial and error your way through that to figure out how it works.

And thanks.

>>11308030
[Insert Tesla quote]