4

I am working on a comic book script right now. Nothing of my draft (except dialogues) will be read by readers; the only purpose of my draft is to narrate the story to my friend, the illustrator.

Anytime I introduce a new character, I could write a few hundred words... or I could attach a photo of my character's appearance.

The problem is to find the right picture on the Internet.

Is there any free gallery of human faces? A website I could type "woman, 35-40, blonde" into, receiving a hundred different face types I could choose from?

Improve this question
9
  • 2
    I find that the same with my writing as I try to put a face to my character. I tend to use google images and write generic descriptors (Age is used in a words more than numbers. For example, I would use "Teen" or "Child" or "elderly" instead of "13-18", "8-10", or "70s". I'd also add ethnicity, hair color and style. On occasion, I may add an occupation or accessory like "Cop" or "Glasses" to help narrow the face down.
    – hszmv
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 18:21
  • 3
    What's your feeling about a site where you have to repeatedly hit refresh in the hope of randomly stumbling across someone who matches the description...?
    – DM_with_secrets
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 18:30
  • 6
    I’m voting to close this question because it doesn't seem to be a writing question.
    – user11111111111
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 20:52
  • 1
    I googled "middle-aged blonde woman" and got about ten thousand pics. You may have less of a problem than you think. google.com/…
    – DWKraus
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 23:31
  • 1
    Get a game with a good face generator. Fallout 4 comes to mind as pretty generic; if your story is set in different times something more fitting the styles of the time would work better - something from Dark Souls series for fantasy, Cyberpunk 2077 for futuristic. Then just create the face you want and screenshot it.
    – SF.
    Commented Apr 1, 2021 at 10:14

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
2

The site ArtBreeder it's just what you need.

It basically lets you create all kinds of imagery by AI. One of the options is for portraits.

You can take some of the million random portraits included or upload your own pics to mix them and generate new ones combining their facial traits. You can also configure what each -parent- pic contributes to the -children- generated ones, besides other attributes, by shifting some slide bars.

Improve this answer
2

You can actually type gender, age, and physical characteristics into Google image search:

enter image description here

Most of the results come from stock photo agencies, who label their images with gender, age, and physical characteristics of the models, among other information. You can also search on the websites of stock photo agencies directly.

As long as you don't publish the images you are free to do with them whatever you like, but as soon as you distribute a file with images you don't have the right to distribute, you are on dangerous ground. I'd rather include a link to the image instead of the image itself, if I wanted to show my idea of a character to an illustrator.

The appearance of a character in an illustration or movie is often better based on a marketing strategy (what characters is your target audience most attracted to?) instead of on the personal preference of the author, and visual marketing is the expertise of the illustrator, so you might want to leave the looks of the character to them or at least discuss the appearance of the character with them.

Improve this answer
1

The closest thing I can come up with is an unfree, AI-generated face library. Seeing that this is a paid service, I doubt that there is some free service for this purpose, that does it better.

Improve this answer
1

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.