Design Studies / Style Studies
Testing a Style
How I take a style I like on Instagram and test it on our own work: a soft watercolour look, tried on a barn render and its interior.
see it, test itExperimentPersonal R&D
A loose, paper-textured watercolour of an interior caught my eye on Instagram. The question was simple: could our photoreal renders be turned into drawings like this, keeping the architecture, the people and the mood, but losing the polish?
- Read the style. Gemini turns the reference into a written prompt: format, palette, brushwork, paper and how much to leave out.
- Build the flow. The prompt goes into a node workflow in Weave, with the render as the image to restyle.
- Run and compare. Several image models are tried side by side, and the best result is checked against the render.
Before and after
Drag to compare
Our watercolour version on the left. On the right, switch between the original render and the Instagram reference to compare the style with its source.
What I check
- Kept: the building’s form, PV array, glazing rhythm, hens, the stair, lantern, people and dog.
- Gained: paper grain, a soft vignette and loose washes that read as hand-made.
- Drifted: the barn gets shorter and its trees move; the interior is cropped tighter and the stair simplified.
- Verdict: good for early concept and social posts, not yet reliable where proportions matter.
The process
From a post to a workflow in about 15 minutes
Screen recording, sped up from about 15 minutes: the Instagram reference, the prompt extracted with Gemini, the node flow in Weave and the results coming in.
What I’m testing next
Next is steering the drift: locking proportions with the render as a stronger guide, and building the style into a reusable preset so the same look can be applied to any project image.