A Curated, Battle-Tested Hand-Drawn Style Library That Keeps Going Viral on Xiaohongshu
Purely hand-typed, 0% AI content, please enjoy with confidence
Recently, major social media platforms have significantly tightened their regulation of AIGC works, causing many creators to frequently face shadow-banning or be flagged as low-creativity content. I am no exception; two of my WeChat Official Account accounts and my Xiaohongshu account have encountered similar situations.
So, I dug deep into each platform's requirements for AIGC content. The platforms are not against AIGC itself, but against erroneous, low-quality, and unverifiable works produced by AIGC. Once this type of content floods the platform, it is not only a disaster for the platform but could have an even greater impact on readers, such as incorrect dietary habits, wrong recipes, imprecise tips, and so on.
Under these circumstances, at this stage, platforms are still unable to perform strong verification on the content of the works themselves to guarantee correctness and quality, so they have no choice but to increase restrictions on AIGC works.
ps: The above are personal views, for reference only.
In this situation, we creators can only adapt. After a period of exploration and verification, I believe that picture-book and story-type content is still a completely viable product category. This type has the following characteristics:
- The story plot is relatively simple, less prone to errors, and less likely to stir up controversy.
- Works composed of multiple images and pages are less likely to be judged as low-creativity.
- Readers have no mental burden in understanding and easily resonate with the content.
There are two key elements to creating this type of work:
- The story itself, which can be generated by AI, but must be verified by yourself. It is recommended to set up some gating Agents first, go through a round of AI verification, and then act as the final gatekeeper yourself.
- The illustration style. The quality of the illustration style directly determines whether readers are willing to look and whether it can capture their attention; simultaneously, it must be capable of expressing the story's plot.
I believe no one lacks stories; they come from inspiration in life, from works in the same niche, or we can let AI assist us in producing them. Today, let's focus on the matter of illustration style.
For my own works, I have tried various styles: "intentionally badly drawn" doodle style, Scribbli style, Ghibli style, blackboard newspaper style, notepad style, and so on. But there has always been a pain point for me:
Useful, verified hand-drawn style constraints are scattered everywhere—either in an AI chat window, in some corner of the internet, or working full-time in a specific project.
This brings a lot of extra burden to me. Every time I need to use them, I have to search for ages, and the version I find might not even be the one I'm satisfied with. Moreover, these constraints, which took ages to find, usually contain other messy information, such as specific info from the original work, image ratio info, or layout info.
But I just want a style; I just want to change the art style.
So, I purified the verified styles I still use and open-sourced a Hand-Drawn Style Skill.
It includes some popular styles from the internet as well as some styles I created myself, continuously polished until I was satisfied, and only open-sourced after real-world verification.
One of my Xiaohongshu alt accounts, 【一只儿童百科猫】, started with just over 50 followers. Recently, almost every work produced using this Skill has gone viral. After this round of practical verification, I finally open-sourced this Skill.
It does not generate images, nor does it produce complete image generation prompts. It only adds your chosen art style to your image generation prompt—very pure. Other aspects like characters, text, layout, composition, background color, image ratio, and pixels are still entirely up to you.
It is compatible with any mainstream Agent, such as CodeX, Claude Code, Open Claw, etc.
It will be continuously updated, but I have one iron rule: a style that has not been personally verified by me to my satisfaction will never enter the library. The same goes for styles contributed by others; contributions of ideas and co-maintenance are welcome, but you must provide evidence of your verification.
We will absolutely not create products like those "1000 God-Level Prompts" on the market. Those products only provide prompts, and they are copied back and forth, unverified. Some haven't even been run by anyone, and they are not ready-to-use; they usually contain some customized elements inside. This is not our goal.
A Short Story
Let me tell you a short story about the creation process of "Crayon Child's Scribble" and "Crayon Real Shot". Initially, I only made "Crayon Child's Scribble", a style that looks clumsy and messy without any obvious flaws, which I designed myself. I published works in this style, and the data was also very good.
But after a friend used it, he said he was not satisfied. His reasoning left me with no comeback. He showed me a real piece of work his daughter had scribbled with crayons. I was genuinely surprised after one look; the image looked like a real person's work at first glance—just intuitively felt like it was drawn by a real person. In comparison, our "Crayon Child's Scribble" was too evenly and fully colored. Even with some parameter adjustments and random pressure settings, it still looked obviously fake by comparison.
So, I upgraded the style targeting real scribbling. When a real child scribbles with crayons, it's imperfect; sometimes the coloring is incomplete, the brushstrokes have no regular direction, the pressure is very deep in some places, and in others, it's just a light sweep with almost no color. On top of this, I also added paper texture elements to make the overall look more realistic. I also published a work for verification in this style, and it was also a hit.
I felt that instead of overwriting "Crayon Child's Scribble", I should make the real child's scribble into a completely new style, called "Crayon Real Shot".
Scope of Capabilities
I currently use this Skill myself to create children's stories and picture books, but because of its extreme purity, its capabilities and scenarios are far from limited to stories and picture books:
- If you often create illustrations for articles, social media, documents, etc., and you also like hand-drawn styles, it will suit you well.
- If you create content about parenting, popular science, or technical explanations, you can also use it right away.
- If you create knowledge card-type works, it can also handle the job.
- ... As long as you like hand-drawn styles.
This library will continue to be updated, and contributions from everyone are welcome~