I've been trying to transition from SD1.5 to SDXL for a while, but old prompting habits die hard.
Even more difficult was finding a model to produce the look I prefer. Most seem to love realism, 3D pixar style, anime, and super airbrushed.
If you have any tips for SDXL models, loras, prompting for this style, etc. please let me know!
parameters:
1girl, demon woman with bangs and ram horns and wings, holding bloody human heart, solo, sitting with knees up, (full body:0.6), looking at viewer, (dark fantasy theme:1.1) (glowing eyes:1.05), thick lines, flat shading
Negative prompt: low quality, deformed, embedding:negativeXL_D, embedding:unaestheticXL_Sky3.1,
Steps: 10, Sampler: dpmpp_3m_sde_simple, CFG scale: 1.0, Seed: 212036223314935, Size: 1024x1024, Model hash: 268a170aa6, Model: grogmixTURBO_v10
(and some inpainting/upscaling)
If you can avoid the turbo/lightning models, they're not as good as regular XL.
Likewise with XL the less negative prompts the better, I usually operate on none or only 'text,watermark'
As for style, LORA or prompting an artists name is your best bet.
If you're after anime/cartoon, Ponydiffuser is the best. It operates on booru tags, so it can't imagine much outside of that range but the flipside is it can create basically anything within those confines. Pony also has an extremely wide range of artist/style LORA to recreate any sort of look you're after.
For realism you've got a few options of models, none are stand-out better than the other top rated ones.