After looking at a few more AI options, I settled on openart.ai. Hugging Face is too complicated for a guy with as much on his plate as I have. Openart.ai is complicated enough as it is. The things they say they can do are incredible though. It may not make everything I've learned obsolete, but it's a very powerful addition to the toolkit.
Here's the influencer I created with flux1.ai again -
The problem with this is, her hair style is not close enough to her appearance in the comic. I thought this was as close as I was likely to get with text prompting, but Openart.ai has a feature for turning sketches into realistic images. So I took an image from the comic, and the nicest thing I could get was a color image of my drawing -
It kept trying to make a child, even though I said the character should look like she's 20.
So I took the image from flux, converted it into a crude line art image, and made the changes to the hairstyle and costume that I wanted -
No need to make this pretty for human eyes. It's just a test to see if the idea would work.
After a few tries, I was able to get these two images -
For some reason, AI hates sweeping the bangs to the side of the face. That area is screwed up in the grey suit pic. The AI also hates doing those hair bows as hair, but it got them half right in the grey suit pic.
Back to GIMP we go for more image manipulation. I took the hair bows from the grey suit pic and composited them into the black suit pic -
Another trip through the AI, and another round of image editing, and the face and hair are mostly done -
I'd like to improve the hair bangs she has swept to the side, but if there is a name for that, I don't know what it is, so it is difficult to search for examples of it. Any hairstylists here, feel free to chime in.