There's no guro in this post (at least not yet), it's just a post about a convenient trick tried out.

Oddly enough it's easier to start with rough sketches and line art and turn that into photorealistic images than it is when your starting material is already semi-realistic, having fairly realistic shading and detail.

This image (from artist Seven Gromwoid) is one of those things that if I ask Qwen Image Edit to make it photorealistic, nothing or nearly nothing in the image changes.

So I decided to try first changing this image into line art with the simple prompt "Render as line art".

That gave me the image I'll attach to my follow-up post.