How Illustrious prompts work
- Illustrious is trained on danbooru tags — prompt with tags (1girl, solo, cowboy shot, looking at viewer) rather than long sentences.
- It needs less quality boilerplate than Pony: a short "masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic" is usually enough; some checkpoints like a "newest" or "year 2024" recency tag.
- Unlike Pony, Illustrious does NOT use the score_9 ladder — skip score tags entirely.
- Character, series and artist tags are strongly trained — use them deliberately, and weight with (tag:1.1) when one needs a nudge.
Example Illustrious prompt
masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic, 1girl, solo, long hair, blue eyes, school uniform, classroom, looking at viewer, soft lighting
negative: worst quality, low quality, bad anatomy, extra digits, jpeg artifacts
Build Illustrious prompts faster with Prompt Builder
- Offline danbooru tag autocomplete as you type — the heart of Illustrious prompting.
- One-click quality and negative blocks; no score ladder to retype.
- Illustrious / anime template packs to start in seconds.
- Weight any tag with Ctrl/Cmd + ↑/↓, and import prompts from PNGs.
Frequently asked questions
Is Illustrious better than Pony for anime?▾
It’s newer, reads danbooru tags more directly, and needs lighter quality boilerplate; many creators prefer it for character accuracy. Both are excellent — try both.
Do I use score tags with Illustrious?▾
No — unlike Pony, Illustrious doesn’t use the score_9 ladder. Use a short quality tag like "masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic" instead.
How do I prompt characters in Illustrious?▾
Use the danbooru character and series tags directly — they’re strongly trained — plus a short quality tag and any style or artist tags.
Keep exploring
- Prompt weighting & LoRA syntax guide
- Prompt glossary
- Other models: SDXL · Flux · Midjourney · Pony Diffusion · Stable Diffusion · ComfyUI · Automatic1111