Using text-to-image AI gives us the chance to quickly turn a written concept into an image. An author can imagine a side character. A video game designer can explore a few costume possibilities. A creator might try out a few mascot ideas. It still doesn’t mean that AI prompts are a magic bullet.
AI allows you to be faster in exploring ideas, but it’s not a replacement for good taste, thorough research, or storytelling or artistic decisions. You can use AI like a creative assistant for options, but be ready to take full responsibility for the final design.
What Are Text-to-Image AI Prompts?
A text-to-image prompt is a series of written words you give to an AI image maker. The AI image maker processes your words and creates an image according to them. For example, you can use your prompt to describe the age, job, clothing, expression, action, feeling, setting, and artistic approach of your character.
For example, instead of asking “fantasy warrior,” your prompt can be: “a tired desert warrior, sun-worn armor, red scarf, calm expression, standing at sunrise, cinematic fantasy concept art.” That’s more descriptive and much more helpful for the AI.
How Do AI Prompts Fit the Character Design Process?
AI prompts are good for the beginning stages or middle stages of character design, when you need to generate new options, play with different approaches, or understand what a character might look like. The prompts can be used for creating a mood board, a few wardrobe ideas, color ideas, and references. For regular work, it saves you a lot of time.
Maybe you can use AI images for your characters to show them to your author. You can test rough ideas for your characters with a small video game studio before bringing an illustrator on the team. It’s definitely not a replacement for the whole design process. Good character design comes from a goal in mind. Think about these questions before you start your AI: Who is this character? What is their goal? Where do they live?
Top Reasons to Use AI Prompts for Character Design
A primary benefit is speed. With AI, you can quickly produce several visual options and easily compare them. You could have difficulty deciding whether your character’s look should be refined, rough, whimsical, or enigmatic.
Another advantage is precision. A prompt requires you to specify particular things. A “cool detective” is generic, but a “tired urban detective wearing a raincoat, with fatigued eyes, a weathered leather notebook, and an alert stance” will give your character a more well-defined appearance.
AI generators allow you to experiment with different art styles. You can view how one character design could fit into various genres, like a children’s storybook style, graphic novels, realistic cinematic style, and pastel watercolor. If you’re using an image generator from text prompt, prioritize exploring the major artistic ideas rather than attempting to create the ideal finished image.
AI also allows artists who cannot draw to articulate the concepts they’ve visualized. It is possible for an initial idea to be shared with artists, clients, teammates, and collaborators in a way that conveys the overall vision prior to investing money and time in the completed illustration.
What Makes an Effective Character Prompt?
Incorporating function, personality, and visual description makes a good character prompt. Function describes a character’s purpose or occupation. This might be:
- healer
- antagonist
- pilot
- student
- mentor
Personality describes the emotion of the character. Examples are shy, arrogant, compassionate, defiant, or evasive. Visual description makes the character design more specific and concrete. If you start with “a young inventor” that’s a good beginning. “
A young inventor with a curious look, messy hair, round glasses, oil-stained apron, homemade gizmos, bright look, soft lighting in the laboratory” provides the AI with much more information to work with. Also, an effective prompt describes mood or setting. A royal guard in a peaceful castle will have a very different look from a royal guard in the aftermath of a battlefield scene.
How to Construct More Precise Character Prompts
Begin with a purpose for the character before you describe a specific dress or pose. The dress, pose, and expression should serve the character function. If a character is a healer, he or she will wear lighter colors and display a more relaxed body posture. A rogue character may have a slimmer dress style, concealments with tools on their person, and watchful eyes.
Be descriptive, but do not over-describe. A character who is described too precisely will produce an image that looks frozen or chaotic. Conversely, an overly vague character description will produce a generic image. Describe only the key character features specifically.
Keep the minor details undefined. It also helps to structure your prompt by adding a bit of information for each feature each time. Start with a character’s concept, add character’s physical features, clothes, mood or setting, then visual style. Once you have gotten a first image, update or improve the character design by changing just a few parts at a time.
What Text-to-Image AI Can’t Do: Character Design Limitations
AI often cannot generate character designs that are truly cohesive. The same character will look different in different images-faces, outfit details, accessories and even body proportions are constantly changing. This is especially true when the character has to do many different actions in different scenes.
AI can create great images that have nothing of value to say. Dramatic armor and dramatic lighting aren’t enough to give your character a point, purpose and personality. You need clear shapes, understandable design choices, and contextual meaning.
AI often gets historical, cultural and stylistic details wrong. Traditional costume, uniforms, religious or cultural motifs, period-specific armor-all of these details are subject to misinterpretation. If your character is a member of a real culture or ethnicity, is dressed in traditional clothing, or is set in a specific place and time, do proper research; don’t rely solely on AI images.
You also need to be aware of rules regarding the commercial use of AI-generated images and of the data used to train the generator, which can be imitated artist styles. When using unfiltered AI image generator; you need to be aware of the rules on your chosen platform or website. You must also consider the safety and ethics of the AI-generated images-consent, explicit content, harmful stereotypes and audience appropriateness.
Tips for Character Design Prompting
- Don’t just ask for “a pretty princess” or “a cool warrior” or “a horrible beast.” AI will give you a stock image that looks like it came from every concept art generator ever made. Instead, try to include some info about their personality, or history, and so on, even if the concept itself is familiar.
- Don’t put too many conflicting concepts in your prompt. “Minimalist cyberpunk medieval pirate angel detective wearing a school uniform” sounds cool, but it’s just a mess. Focus on a single central idea and then add a few well-thought out secondary features.
- Don’t just name real world artists in your prompt. If you want something “in the style of John Doe” just say “painterly brushstrokes” or “crisp linework” or “muted palette” or “cinematic lighting.” Be descriptive, don’t just name-drop.
- Don’t stop at the first result! Look at the first few to check for weird proportions, broken symmetry (like a face with a crooked eye), bad hands, impossible costume features, cultural appropriation, and other issues like these. Look beyond the style to find the actual character.
A Basic Template for Character Design Prompting
A basic structure for a Character Design Prompt would go something like this:
Character Role, Personality, Features, Outfit, Pose, Background, Style, Mood
For example:
“60 year old happy herbalist in a village, with silver hair and warm eyes, wearing layered robes in different shades of green, holding a basket of herbs while standing outside a wooden store, in a charming storybook illustration style, bathed in the soft light of sunrise.”
Again, notice how this is pretty focused. If I were to use this on my prompt, I might expect 5 or 6 results that look pretty much the same, with a few key differences. It’s enough direction to provide a meaningful iteration.
Using AI Prompts Wisely in a Creative Workflow
To get the best out of AI, think of it as a brainstorming assistant rather than the final product. Use it to spit out ideas. Then take those ideas and mold them so that they align with your story, audience, and design needs. You might take an image it drew, add a touch of hand-drawing to it; write a more specific brief that you’d give to another artist; or simply show you the images it’s generated, and take note of what’s working and what’s not.
And if you’re thinking of making your design available to others, or even sell it, make sure that you’re aware of how the platform wants you to be licensing your designs and avoid anything that looks very similar to other IPs or logos. And save a history of your prompt revisions for later. Sometimes, it’s good to be able to point to the journey you took with the AI, and say “this is why I made certain decisions in my art direction.”
Summary: Improve Prompts, Improve Your Strategy
Using AI text-to-image creation can bring speed, specificity and ease to the character design process. It gives you a way to experiment with different character ideas, different tones, and to give a very clear visual direction.
But AI has limitations and can fail, or give generic, repetitive results. It needs very specific character ideas, prompt directions, research and review, if it is going to give a good result. Done properly, the AI won’t replace creativity. It will increase the range of your possibilities, give you a better language for asking questions and a greater sense of confidence in your character design journey.
