Mapelle Gazing at the Atlantic Canadian Landscape

Mapelle (pronounced Maip-elle) enjoying a hike and seeing the outdoors of Atlantic Canada.

Needed a female OC that is not a Border Collie. It all started from a naming bounty on Civitai that I participated recently (and won unofficially). That name was Mapelle (a more French version of Maple). I came up with that name as the Montreal Canadiens (a team in the National Hockey League, or the NHL) were in the playoffs (unfortunately, they loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, bringing another year of Stanley Cup drought for Canada). The host of the bounty did picked another name for their Canadian character, so I basically get to keep the name for myself.

I needed a Canadian dog breed that did fit the name, and since the name was French, it would have to be a dog breed with a French-Canadian and/or Eastern Canada origin. The one dog breed that did both, and also peaked my interest was the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (they're retrievers that look like Border Collies due to similar markings and a more fox-like face). The breed was developed by the Acadians (French ethnic group). Looking at e6ai and e621, I am surprised of how sparse they are compared to other breeds (3 on e6ai and 73 on e621 before this post). I was worried that the checkpoint models would not know what the breed looked like, but from testing a few models and playing around with the prompts, I can conclude that the models do know this breed, with some guidance and at least a dozen of generations to get a good result.

There is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Maple (owned by kittysasha) that appears in two images here. Besides the similarity of their names, they are two completely different characters with visually different appearances.

I don't now if this would be the official design for Mapelle, but we'll see how it goes.

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Regarding about my previous post: As much I am disappointed that it did not make the approval, at least the voting process was used to determine its fate. Hopefully, I don't have to think about that too much afterwards.
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Also started adding/editing tags to other folks' posts as well.

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Initial image generated on Draw Things with a Illustrious checkpoint model with separate LoRAs, edited with Photopea and Nano Banana Pro. Will add more detail later.