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Stakeout Bureau

Illustration: halftone, screentone hatching

Stakeout Bureau example 1
Stakeout Bureau model comparison 2
Stakeout Bureau model comparison 3
Stakeout Bureau model comparison 4

The prompt

{subject}, a high-contrast black-and-white surveillance-manga ink treatment, {palette}, the subject rendered entirely in matte ink black and bone-white with no grey wash, all tone built from dense halftone dot fields and sharp screentone hatching, hard diagonal ink cuts and speed-line pressure slicing the composition, crisp rectangular scan-frame brackets, corner crop marks and a floating bounding box overlaid as confidential dossier evidence, one thin surgical accent strip piercing a panel seam to mark a target, tiny OCR-style monospace tick marks running along one edge, cinematic nocturnal adult cyber-noir restraint, fills the frame edge to edge

Materials
matte ink
Techniques
halftone, screentone hatching

ink halftone, screentone, high contrast bw, scan frame, surveillance crop

Slot recipes

How the prompt changes for each kind of picture.

  • Hero: Full-bleed dominant subject crop in ink halftone, aggressive diagonal cut across the frame, large scan-frame bracket framing the focal point, one surgical magenta strip on a seam, OCR ticks down a single edge: cinematic and nocturnal, edge to edge.
  • Feature: Mid-distance subject modeled in screentone with a floating bounding box and corner crop marks, secondary diagonal speed lines, magenta tab marking the flagged detail.
  • Avatar: Tight head-and-shoulders or single-object crop, heavy halftone modeling, square scan-frame bracket tight around the subject, a short magenta tick at one corner, ink-black ground.
  • Empty state: Sparse bone-white field holding a small ghosted subject silhouette in faint halftone, a lone empty bounding box and crop marks, one muted magenta tick: severe emptiness, nocturnal calm.
  • Illustration: Editorial spread crop splicing the subject across hard gutters, layered halftone and diagonal ink cuts, multiple scan brackets and exposure ticks, a single magenta seam interruption: spliced-from-surveillance-footage mood.

Guidance

Do

  • Build every tone from halftone dots and screentone hatching, never a flat grey wash.
  • Crop the subject aggressively and overlay scan-frame brackets, crop marks, a floating bounding box, and edge ticks as dossier apparatus.
  • Drive depth and motion with hard diagonal ink cuts and speed-line pressure.
  • Keep exactly one surgical magenta interruption as a thin strip on a panel seam — danger, target, or selection.
  • Hold pure matte ink black and bone-white as the only base tones; push contrast hard.

Don’t

  • Do not use neon glow, cyan/purple gradients, or rainbow cyberpunk color.
  • Do not let the magenta become a fill, glow, or large area — it stays a single thin strip.
  • Do not let tone collapse into muddy mid-grey; keep it crisp two-tone.
  • Do not add cute manga stickers, chibi, kawaii faces, emoji, or speech bubbles.
  • Do not render readable title text, watermarks, or leave empty whitespace margins around the frame.

In the lineage of

  • Seinen surveillance-thriller manga inking, movement. high-contrast halftone noir

A generated style is an aggregate of many influences. Credit goes to the artists and traditions it draws on; it is not a claim of authorship.

Produced by unrecorded, sourced by unrecorded, images by unrecorded

Remix with this style

Apply Stakeout Bureau to any UI language and swap the palette: the preview takes this style's hero image.