Illithid Prompting Guide

I ran a small sampling batch of 10 images using this prompt. While using the checkpoint you should be able to mimic the quality. I ran batches for Steps 20, 40, 70, and 100. As you can see I wouldn't go above 100 steps. You can still get good results past 100 steps, but that's when it start overdetailing things. Also you can see a majority of them come out purple in color. To fix this, add Purple to the Negative prompt, play around with the colors and taking out colors. Its better to add a color to the Negative prompt than add a color to the prompt. Take out the other primary colors and leave the color you want the Illithid to be. I also heavily use Wildcards and have come up with a few that give amazing results.

Ancient Civilizations, like Persian, Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Ancient Rome, Assyria, Aztec,Olmec, Minoan, Mesopotamia, Mycenaean, Atlantian give them a theme, it adds aspects like jewelry, headdresses, armor to the Illithid which helps change them up. I've also had great success with adding weights to certain words, for the Drow and Illithid I experimented with Spiders and webs. If you add Spiders:0.7 or Webs:0.8 to your prompt you'll see a slight change in the tentacles, and any jewelry. You can change the type of portrait to whatever you want, but Close-up or Medium Close-up works the best, if you go full body you'll get some messed up hands, most of them come out as long pointy fingers that end in spikes, which sometimes is great. I add the tag Volumetric lighting because it gives the image a light source and makes lighting and shadows, glowing. perfect for torches. You can add Flame:0.8 to your prompt along with Volumetric lighting and it will almsot always give some sort of glowing effect. I experimented with adding gross tags also, Pus, Phlegm, seepage, Moist, fester, mucus, ooze, putrid, curd, veins, fluid, which added a level of glossy and wet look to some of them.

Basic Prompt to get results like the samples.

Close-up Portrait of an illithid_Person, Medieval, Volumetric lighting, concept art, brush stroke style, artstation, trending, highly detailed

Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 12, Seed: -1, Size: 512x512