> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.melius.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Static ads from references

> Take a look you like — a mood board, a competitor ad, an existing campaign — and produce a batch of new statics in that style.

This is the most-run workflow on Melius. You have a look you want to hit — your own past campaign, a competitor's ads, a Pinterest board, a fashion editorial — and you want a fresh batch of statics in that style.

**Time:** 10–15 minutes from open canvas to first downloadable assets.
**You'll need:** 2–10 reference images, a clear sense of the product or subject, and a brand anchor if you have one ([how to make one](/help-center/marketers/brand-anchor)).

## The workflow

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open a new canvas">
    Name it for the campaign. If you have a brand anchor, paste it in as a text node now and keep it parked at the top of the canvas — you'll connect things to it later.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Drop your references in">
    Drag 2–10 mood images onto the canvas. Two to four is usually plenty; more than ten often hurts.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Group them as a unified group">
    Select them all, right-click → "Unified group". This gives you one output port for the whole set.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Add the Image Style Analysis template">
    Templates menu → "Image style analysis". A pre-configured text node appears on the canvas, set up to use Gemini 3.1 Pro (the best model for this task).
  </Step>

  <Step title="Connect references → style analysis">
    Drag from the unified group's output into the style analysis node's reference input. Hit run on the text node.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Read what came out">
    The style analysis output is a detailed description: palette, lighting, mood, composition, depth of field, shot type. If anything seems off, edit it directly — the output is just text, you can rewrite it.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Create your output image node">
    Right-click on the canvas → New image node. Pick Nano Banana Pro (best for style adherence) at 2K resolution and the aspect ratio you need (9x16 for stories, 4x5 for feed, 1x1 for legacy, 21x9 for email banners).
  </Step>

  <Step title="Connect the style analysis output to the image node">
    Drag from the style analysis text output into the image node's input.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Write the prompt">
    Keep it short. The style description is doing the heavy lifting. Example:

    ```
    Generate a hero image of [product] [in this scenario].
    Use the style description below as the visual reference.
    ```
  </Step>

  <Step title="Run 3–4 variations">
    Set the variations count to 3 or 4 before hitting run. The model is probabilistic — running multiple in parallel is faster than running one, getting a bad result, and trying again.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Pick winners, tweak the rest">
    Some variants will land, some won't. For the close-but-not-quite ones, edit the prompt directly on that image node — *"keep everything else the same, but..."* — and re-run. Each re-run is saved as a new version on the same node, so you can compare without losing the original.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## A worked example

**Brand:** boutique apparel.
**Goal:** five product hero shots in the style of a fashion editorial moodboard.

The moodboard (six images, all painterly product photography with warm tones) goes into a unified group. Style analysis runs on the group and outputs:

> *"Editorial product photography. Warm golden-hour lighting from camera-left. Shallow depth of field, painterly bokeh. Product centered with negative space above. Color palette: cream, terracotta, soft black. Composition feels like a 1990s magazine layout — generous margins, no graphic overlay..."*

The image node is set to Nano Banana Pro, 4x5, 2K. The prompt:

```
Hero shot of @hoodie in the style described below.
The hoodie is the subject. Soft natural light. Editorial composition.
Use the style description for color, lighting, and mood.
```

Run with 4 variations. Two are usable as-is, two need minor tweaks (one has the hoodie too small in frame; the other has color that's drifted toward orange instead of terracotta). Both fixes happen on the node — edit the prompt, add the constraint, re-run. Total time from blank canvas to four production-ready hero shots: about 12 minutes.

## Common pitfalls

* **Forgetting to run the style analysis node.** If you connect everything and skip the run step on the text node, the analysis output is empty and the image node has no style guidance. Always run the text node before the image node.
* **Mixing incompatible references.** Five fashion editorials and one screenshot of an ecommerce storefront will confuse the style analysis. Keep the moodboard internally consistent.
* **Picking the wrong model.** Nano Banana Pro is best for style adherence. GPT Image 2 is better when the output has a lot of legible typography. Use the right one for the job — see [Pick the right model](/help-center/marketers/picking-models).
* **Skipping the unified group.** You can connect each reference image to the style analysis node individually, but it's tedious and easy to forget one. Unified groups handle this in a single edge.

<Tip>
  Once you have a style analysis text node that's working well, you can copy and paste it across canvases — same brand, different campaigns. It's a small reusable artifact that pays off every time.
</Tip>