Random Artist

If you've ever stared at a blank positive-prompt box trying to remember a third painter's name, this node is for you. Random Artist spits out a name from a bundled list of roughly 4,570 artists, and you drop it into your prompt. Artist-name prompting is one of the oldest SDXL tricks - "in the style of [artist]" moves the image a surprising amount for zero LoRA cost - and this node turns it into a dice roll.

Reach for it when you want variety without thinking. Run a batch where every image gets a different artist name and you get a cheap, fun style survey; it's also genuinely handy for breaking out of a rut where your prompts all lean on the same three illustrators.

How it works

The list lives in data/sdxl_artists.csv, bundled with the pack - one row per artist in the format Name,tag1,tag2,.... The node loads it at startup and does a random.choice over the rows. The mode filter is a substring match against the whole row (name and tags), lowercased, so photo returns artists whose entry contains "photo" anywhere - which is exactly how it surfaces photography-flavored names without the list needing a dedicated column. The node reports itself as always-changed, so it draws a new name every execution rather than caching.

The inputs

Only two, and both easy:

• mode - any, photo, illustration, painting, or watercolor. The README only documents the first three, but the dropdown ships five; painting and watercolor filter against the tags the same way.
• artist_only - default off. When the row carries tags (Aaron Douglas,cubism,...), flipping this on strips everything after the first comma and returns just the name, so "in the style of Aaron Douglas" rather than a comma-bomb in your prompt.

Output is a single STRING, wired straight into your positive prompt (or a text-concat node if you want to build the full sentence).

Gotchas

• There is no seed input. The pick is nondeterministic and can't be reproduced. That's kind of the point, but if you want a specific artist, hard-type the name - don't reroll until the dice land.
• The substring filter means illustration matches rows whose tags mention illustration, and a mode with no matches raises a ValueError ("No artists containing 'x' were found") that surfaces as a node error. Every mode in the dropdown has at least some matches, so this is more of a warning for custom edits than a real trap.
• Because it always re-executes, don't put it in a position where it reruns a big expensive sampler for every small tweak elsewhere in the graph - same advice as any random node.

Install it the usual way - ComfyUI Manager, search ComfyUI-Bricolage, or git clone https://github.com/sheldongriffin/ComfyUI-Bricolage into custom_nodes/ and restart. Zero models to download, zero extra dependencies beyond the pack's Pillow/torchvision. This is a tiny utility from a personal-repo pack with no support promise, but for a node this simple that's basically fine - the failure surface is a CSV file, and it does its one job well.