Merrimo User Guide › AI generation and art

Choose and create art styles on Mac

Every picture Merrimo draws can follow an art style: more than 200 built-in styles, and styles you make yourself. The Style Browser shows them all as samples, side by side, so you can compare them and pick one for your story, a panel or a character.

Open the Style Browser

• To choose your story’s style, the one new panels and characters start with, click Style in the toolbar.
• To choose a style for one panel or character, click the style menu beside the Style switch in its inspector.

Find a style

The samples fill the window, grouped under Suggested for this story, My Styles, Illustration, Painting and Photo. Click a group’s name to fold it away.

• Suggested for this story starts with your story’s style, then the styles your story’s pictures already use, most used first. With Use AI on, it adds up to six styles chosen for your story’s premise and style guide.
• Type in the search field to find styles by name, or by method, era or genre (try “etching” or “graphic novel”).
• Use the Genre, Era, Method and Color menus to narrow the samples. Each menu shows how many styles each choice would leave. Choose more than one value in a menu to see styles with any of them. A menu in use shows what you chose; click its × to clear it. The browser opens with the filters you left on.
• Drag the size slider at the top right to make the samples smaller or larger. Merrimo remembers the size.

Hold the pointer over a sample to see it large on the right, with its tags and description. Your story’s style has a checkmark wherever it appears, and on the right it says how many of your story’s pictures use it.

Compare styles with Same Scene

Click Same Scene at the top to see every style drawing one shared scene: an explorer with a lantern on a stone bridge, a ruined castle behind her. Only the style changes from one sample to the next, so you can see what each style does to a picture. Click Sample to go back to each style’s own sample.

With a genre chosen and the samples at their smallest, a whole genre fits in the window at once.

Your own styles join Same Scene once you draw the scene for them (see Draw a preview). Until then they show their preview.

Use a style

Click a sample to select it, then click Use This Style (or press Return). Double-click a sample to use it at once. Click Cancel (or press Esc) to close the browser without changing anything.

Make your own style

1. Click Create Style… at the bottom left. To start from a style you like, Control-click its sample and choose Duplicate instead.
2. Type a Name.
3. Write the Prompt Template: the words the picture model gets for every picture in this style. The highlighted {$@} is the subject: it is replaced by each shot’s description. Click Insert Subject to put one where the cursor is. Save stays off until the template has one. With Use AI on, Write with AI drafts the template from the name and description.
4. Describe the style in a few words under Description. With Use AI on, Fill with AI writes it, and the Restyle Prompt, from the preview, or from the name and template when there is no preview yet.
5. Add Tags, which the browser’s menus filter by: choose a Category, then type in Genre, Era, Method or Color. Pick one of the values other styles use, or Add “…” as a new …; Return adds the highlighted one. Click a tag’s × to remove it.
6. Click Restyle Prompt to open it. It is what Restyle sends to turn a picture into this style; leave it empty to use the default “Turn this image into…” instruction, or click Fill from Style to write one from the style.
7. Click Save (or press ⌘S).

Text the AI wrote is marked Filled with AI · Undo until you change it. Click Undo to put back what was there before.

To change one of your styles later, select it and click Edit Style on the right. Delete removes it, and Styles takes you back to the browser.