My Art AFTER A.I. "gloss" (pre-photoshop)

I could keep prompting it in different ways until it was close enough to my vision that I could fix the rest in Photoshop. My style falls somewhere between traditional manga and comic book art. Many times, the A.I. image would be too "anime" (like above) or too photo-realistic. Fortunately, since I had such a strong idea about what the characters should look like from years of drawing them, it was just a matter of time before the A.I. model would finally generate an image that would make me say "that's Mei."

The inconsistencies ("slop") that come from A.I. visualizations are not always easily fixable in Photoshop. Trust me, I've been working on this full-time for months and still haven't gotten it to where I'm satisfied with it. The "six-finger problem" is just the beginning. I spent endless hours trying to keep consistency with the characters, their clothing, their hair color and styles... And on top of that, sometimes objects and buildings would be photo-realistic, which looks cool but has a downside. We are accustomed to seeing the work of human artists and all of these artifacts draw attention and distract readers from what I want them to focus on: the story.

One night, a promising idea popped into my mind: instead of fighting with the fully rendered images, what if I created pencil-sketch versions of the panels? Not only would that be much easier to Photoshop to my liking, I could hire a colorist to give the panels consistent coloring and finalize the look in a way that actually matches what we expect comic books to look like!