Anime Sky
- cel painted daylight
- cumulus and cerulean
- hand painted sky
A deep cerulean sky over painted greens, with the clouds kept pure white.
Opens an image model with the palette in the prompt. The same words work on a video model.
- #2E7FC2
- #7FC0E8
- #FFFFFF
- #F7EFD8
- #8FBF6A
- #3F6B3A
What it is for
A painted sky is deeper at the top than any photograph of a sky, and the white of the cloud is brighter than film can hold. The pair together is why the look reads as painted before anything else in the frame does.
Warm light with blue shadow is the other half. It is how a painter separates a lit surface from a shaded one without changing the colour of the object.
How it works
Make the sky a real cerulean and deepen it toward the top of the frame. A pale blue sky is the single most common failure.
Keep the clouds pure white with a soft edge. No grey in the underside: the shadow on a cloud here is a cooler white, not a grey.
Warm the greens with yellow and put the shadows in blue. Grey shadow on foliage is what makes a painted scene look photographic.
When to use it
Use it for a landscape, a summer scene, a school roof, a train window, a title card, anything that has to feel remembered rather than seen.
Leave it alone for anything at night or indoors. The palette is built around daylight and has no dark end.
Told apart from its neighbours
A pastel palette shares the soft feeling but has no saturation. This one is fully saturated and gets its calm from the flat areas instead.
Sitcom Brights is also flat and warm, but it is an interior palette built on wood and cream. This one needs sky.
Where it was used
Japanese animation background painting settled the rules in the 1980s, working in poster colour on board. The deep sky and the pure cloud survived the move to digital because they were never a limitation, they were a choice.
- My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
- Your Name (2016)
- Wolf Children (2012)
The prompt
Run it as it stands, or drop the colour clause into a prompt you already have. It works in an image prompt and in a video prompt.
<subject>, a hand painted daylight palette of deep cerulean sky and pure white cloud over warm yellow-green foliage, every colour laid down as a flat area with a soft edge, warm light and blue shadows, no grey and no black anywhere
What goes wrong
The sky comes back pale and the picture goes hazy. Say deep cerulean, deepening toward the top of the frame.
Grey shadow appears on the foliage. Say the shadows are blue and there is no grey and no black anywhere.
Leave out
grey sky, black shadows, hazy or muted colour, photographic depth of field
Watch for
The sky has to be deeper than the clouds are bright. A pale sky turns the whole picture into haze.
Questions
Paint it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
