Here’s a simple tutorial to make consistent characters with AI for your children’s books, comic books, and story books. This tutorial uses Midjourney ($10/month).

Here’s the Youtube version of this post:

Consistent Characters in AI Images

1. Upload Your Character Image

To get started, you need a clear image of the character you want to use as a reference. The higher quality and more detailed the image, the better the results.

If you want to upload an image you made outside of Midjourney:

• Go to Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com

• Click the “+” to upload your character image.

• Once uploaded, your image will appear in the project.

• Click on it to open it and select the “Use as Character Reference” icon.

If you want to use a Midjourney image you’ve already created as your reference:

• Go to Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com

• Right-click on the image

• Click “Use”

• Click “Image”

• Then, click the “Character Reference” icon

2. Add the Character Reference to Your Prompt

Now that your reference image is ready, write the rest of your prompt.

• Click on the character reference image

• Type the rest of your prompt where it says Imagine (e.g. setting the style or adding more details)

3. Generate Your Image

With your reference image plus your prompt, you're ready to go!

• Hit “Enter” to submit your prompt with character reference

• Midjourney will create a new image that resembles your character from the reference, but with the variations you’ve requested in the prompt.

Here are 4 images generated with a reference character - notice how the character (Filipina woman) is consistent across all AI images:

There is also the parameter “Character Weight”, and if you set to 100 --cw 100, Midjourney will includes as much detail as possible. If you lower this setting to --cw 0, the focus will mainly be on the character's face.

Closing Thoughts

For the best results, your reference image should ideally focus on ONE character. Midjourney’s Character Reference works best with non-human characters, like cartoon or animated characters. Similarly, Leonardo.AI also offers a Consistent Characters feature (here’s their tutorial).

Other tools like RenderNet are specialized for consistent human characters, e.g. for ecommerce or product videos.

As a next step, and pretty mindblowing, you can animate all your consistent AI images into video clips to make a consistent-character video! For example, upload your consistent AI images into blotato, then click “Create Animated Image”, and choose an image-to-video model (runway, kling, minimax, ltx, veo, etc.) which will convert each image into a short video clip.

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