cahlen/oc-punk-flyer-sdxl-lora

OC Punk Flyer LoRA — Orange County California Punk Art Style

A LoRA fine-tune of SDXL 1.0 trained on Orange County, California punk rock flyer art from 1978–2000. Generates high-contrast Xerox-style collages, cut-and-paste zine aesthetics, skull/skeleton motifs, and Southern California beach-nihilism imagery in the visual language of the OC hardcore punk scene — the same DIY aesthetic behind bands like Social Distortion, The Offspring, Bad Religion, Agent Orange, and the entire Huntington Beach / Costa Mesa / Fullerton punk underground.

Trigger word: oc-punk-flyer

Example Generations

OC City Vibes

Huntington Beach — Surf Punk	Huntington Beach — Pier Walk	Costa Mesa — Strip Mall Decay

Irvine — Tract Houses	Santa Ana — Downtown Grit	Orange — Old Towne

Tustin — Hangar Ruins	Long Beach — Harbor Industrial	Irvine — Suburban Sprawl

Collages

Skulls & Hands	Surf & Death	Eyes

Raised Fist	TV Static	Suburban Decay

Anarchy	Beach Punk	Skate & Destroy

Punk Portraits & Objects

Guitar Closeup	Mohawk Portrait	Mosh Pit

Combat Boots	Burning Suburbs	Skeleton Beach

Skater Punk	Beach Nihilism	Skulls Collage

Usage

With Diffusers

import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionXLPipeline

pipe = StableDiffusionXLPipeline.from_pretrained(
    "stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    variant="fp16",
)
pipe.load_lora_weights("cahlen/oc-punk-flyer-sdxl-lora")
pipe.set_adapters(["default_0"], adapter_weights=[0.4])
pipe.to("cuda")

image = pipe(
    prompt="oc-punk-flyer, collage of skulls and reaching hands, torn paper edges, xerox photocopy, high contrast, no text, no words, no letters",
    negative_prompt="text, words, letters, writing, typography, font, caption, label, title, headline, sign, logo, watermark, signature, blurry, photorealistic, photo, smooth gradients, 3d render, clean, modern, digital",
    width=768,
    height=1024,
    num_inference_steps=30,
    guidance_scale=7.5,
).images[0]

image.save("punk_art.png")

With ComfyUI / A1111

Load pytorch_lora_weights.safetensors as a standard SDXL LoRA. Use trigger word oc-punk-flyer in your prompt.

Recommended Settings

Parameter	Recommended	Notes
LoRA scale	0.3–0.5	Sweet spot for style without text artifacts. See guide below.
Resolution	768x1024	Portrait orientation works best (trained at 1024px)
CFG / Guidance	7.5	Standard SDXL guidance
Steps	25–30	Diminishing returns past 30
Sampler	Euler a, DPM++ 2M Karras	Standard SDXL samplers

LoRA Scale Guide

The most important parameter. Controls how much of the punk flyer style is applied:

Scale	Effect	Best For
0.3	Light style influence, very clean	Crowd scenes, portraits — subjects that tend to trigger text
0.35	Moderate style, mostly clean	General purpose, collages, city scenes
0.4	Strong style, good balance	Collages, objects, landscapes — the default sweet spot
0.5	Full style, occasional text artifacts	Skulls, skeletons, abstract subjects that don't trigger text
0.6+	Very strong, likely text artifacts	Only for subjects that never trigger text (abstract, objects)

Text Suppression

This LoRA was trained on punk rock flyers which are inherently text-heavy. The model has learned to associate the style with text/typography elements. To generate clean art without garbled text:

1. Use LoRA scale 0.3–0.4 (most important)
2. Add to your prompt: no text, no words, no letters
3. Add to negative prompt: text, words, letters, writing, typography, font, caption, label, title, headline, sign, logo, watermark, signature
4. Avoid "performance" prompts — band-on-stage, concert venue, performer compositions strongly trigger text. Use object/scene/collage prompts instead.

Prompt Tips

• Always start with the trigger word: oc-punk-flyer
• Collage prompts work best: collage of [subjects], torn paper, xerox texture, high contrast
• Object-focused prompts stay clean: guitars, boots, skateboards, buildings
• Scene/landscape prompts work well: burning houses, beach scenes, urban decay, suburban sprawl
• Add xerox/zine keywords to reinforce the style: xerox texture, xerox photocopy, punk zine, torn paper, cut-and-paste
• Avoid: poster, flyer, banner, concert, show, performing (trigger text generation)

Training Details

Parameter	Value
Base model	stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0
Framework	SimpleTuner
LoRA rank / alpha	32 / 32
Optimizer	Prodigy (auto-adjusting LR, initial 1.0)
Batch size x Accum	1 x 4 (effective batch 4)
Max steps	3,500
Precision	bf16
SNR gamma	5
Noise offset	0.05
Caption dropout	0.20

Dataset

Metric	Value
Sources	Cornell Digital Library, Internet Archive
Raw scraped	2,351 punk flyer images
Curated	Top 200 by programmatic scoring (entropy, contrast, B&W fraction, edge density, aspect ratio, resolution)
After preprocessing	402 images (200 original + 200 B&W augmentation + 2 multi-crop)
Repeats	2
Effective samples/epoch	804
Total epochs	~17.4
Caption strategy	Instance prompt only (oc-punk-flyer) — style LoRAs learn better when captions describe content only

Why SDXL over FLUX

SDXL 1.0 (3.5B parameters) was chosen over FLUX (12B+) because FLUX's strong photorealistic prior overwhelms rank-32 style LoRAs. SDXL's smaller parameter count is more amenable to specialized art styles at practical LoRA ranks.

Style Reference

This LoRA captures the visual language of Orange County punk/hardcore flyers from 1978–2000:

• High-contrast Xerox aesthetic — photocopied, degraded, raw
• Cut-and-paste collage — torn paper, magazine cutouts, layered imagery
• Skull/skeleton motifs — the universal punk visual shorthand
• Beach nihilism — palm trees, surf culture subverted with death imagery
• Suburban decay — tract houses, strip malls, power lines, OC sprawl
• DIY zine culture — hand-drawn, rough, anti-commercial

License

This LoRA inherits the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license from the SDXL base model.

Acknowledgments

Training data sourced from public digital archives (Cornell Digital Library, Internet Archive). This LoRA is a tribute to the OC punk and hardcore community and their extraordinary DIY visual culture.