Turn a Person’s Photo into a Hand-Drawn Storybook Character

Use the single uploaded photo of a person as the only visual reference. Create a cute, hand-drawn 2D portrait of that person as a character from a fairy-tale collection, in the style of a warm children’s picture book.

Use the photo as the sole source for the person’s identity and recognizable facial features, hairstyle and hair color, skin tone, clothing and its colors or patterns, and all visible accessories or distinctive features. Do not copy clothing, hairstyles, or accessories from any example illustrations. Do not invent details that are not visible.

Priority order:
1. Preserve the person’s recognizable facial features.
2. Preserve their actual hairstyle, clothing, colors, and accessories.
3. Apply a cute, hand-drawn children’s-book style.
4. Use charmingly exaggerated proportions.
5. Keep the result simple, warm, and cute.

Character design: Use a very large, rounded head and a small, compact upper body with narrow shoulders, short simplified arms, and a soft rounded silhouette. Make the head approximately 60–70% of the character’s visual space. Use slightly childlike proportions and a centered, symmetrical composition. Avoid realistic anatomy.

Face: Keep enough distinctive features for the person to be recognizable. Use tiny vertical oval or dot eyes, a very small curved nose or barely noticeable nasal septum, a tiny smile, large round rosy cheeks with soft peach or pink blush, a rounded face, and minimal eyebrows where appropriate. The expression should be soft, joyful, innocent, and slightly playful. Avoid realistic eyes, defined lips, realistic skin texture, sharp facial shadows, anime rendering, and glossy 3D features. Use eyelashes only if they are a distinctive feature of the person.

Hair: Reproduce the actual hairstyle in simplified form, preserving length, bangs or side-swept bangs, parting, curls or waves, ponytails or braids, facial hair, hair accessories, and approximate color as applicable. Turn individual strands into large hand-drawn shapes. Do not add braids, ponytails, bangs, bows, bonnets, or ribbons unless they appear in the photo.

Clothing and accessories: Keep the same outfit, preserving visible garment type, neckline, sleeves, layers, dominant colors, patterns, buttons, collars, logos or recognizable motifs, scarves, outerwear, decorations, and accessories. Simplify details into the drawn style without changing the outfit’s design. If a detail is not visible, simplify rather than inventing a fashionable replacement. Retain visible accessories such as glasses, earrings, necklaces, hats, hijabs, headbands, hair clips, watches, bracelets, rings, bags, headphones, ribbons, and pins, preserving their recognizable shapes and original colors.

Composition: Create a square 1:1 portrait, framed roughly at the waist or chest. Center the character, have them face the viewer, and let them occupy most of the frame while leaving balanced negative space around the head. Adapt the pose from the photo if useful, simplifying it into a cute version. If the original pose is unimportant or the hands are not visible, use a charming, relaxed pose with arms slightly raised, held against the torso, or lowered along the body. Do not impose a pose from an example illustration.

Style: Make a distinctly hand-drawn 2D children’s-book illustration. Use delicate gouache, wax crayon, colored pencil, or dry pastel effects; slightly chalky texture; thin, uneven pigment; hand-painted, uneven edges; visible paper-like grain; simple flat shapes; and very limited shading. Use soft, slightly uneven dark-brown or almost-black linework, never perfectly clean vector lines. The result should feel warm, tactile, imperfect, and human-made.

Color: Use soft, warm colors based primarily on the uploaded photo, preserving the person’s natural colors.