But it sometimes kind of drifts off into photorealistic output, which is not what I desire from it, so I decided to make a merge variant that would mostly behave like Artium but be more likely to fall back to anime style than photorealistic.

In the end I decided to merge in some amount of the anima_pencil-XL checkpoint, which itself is a merge of blue_pencil-XL and Animagine XL.

Regarding permissions: I'm very much an amateur at this, so I just copied the more strict set from Artium.

Regarding prompts and generation settings: Up to you really.

I like to keep my prompts simple - see the sample images I uploaded. No need to overcomplicate things anyomore.

I mostly use DPM++ 2M Karras with 20 steps, but that's a matter of personal preference and because these settings will work well with most models.

I did a bit of trial and error before finding a merge recipe that seems to have achieved my intent.

One of the experiments I did was take the weight differences between Artium v1 and SDXL and add 50% of that back into Artium for what I called Artium 150%. This resulted in a more anime-like model that near enough achieved all I wanted on its own without breaking.

I also tried adding the weight differences between animapencil and sdxl into Artium, but the outcome had more more flat tones and less texture than where I was intending to go.

The end model I uploaded here is a merge between those two models and another 10% of the weight differences between Artium and SDXL added in, giving the model effectively 135% of Artium and 25% of Anima_Pencil.

I compared about 250 generated images between my model, Artium v1.0 and a 20% Weight-Sum between Artium and AnimaPencil to make sure I didn't break anything while I was at it. Looks good.

About 50 of those images were specifically to check if hand generation got worse - which I'm happy to report it didn't. There were no statistically different outcomes looking at 90 different hands per model.