Character Portraits

Writer+ Custom portrait generation requires a Writer, Creator, or Professional plan. Starter plan users can select from preset portraits.

What Character Portraits Are

Character portraits are AI-generated ink illustrations that give your characters a visual identity. Every portrait is rendered in Genesis Writer's signature art style — warm cream backgrounds, crosshatch shading, thick black outlines, and a hand-drawn editorial feel. They look like they were sketched by an illustrator, not generated by a machine.

Portraits are generated on-demand in seconds and come in five distinct ink illustration styles, each with its own visual personality.

The five portrait styles — each gives your character a distinct visual feel

The Five Portrait Styles

Each style produces a different look while staying within the ink illustration family. Choose the one that matches your character's tone and genre:

Generating a Portrait

You can generate a portrait during the character creation wizard (Step 3) or by editing an existing character and navigating to the portrait section.

1. Select a portrait style from the five options.
2. Optionally enter a custom prompt describing the character's appearance.
3. Click Generate.
4. Wait a few seconds for the portrait to render.
5. If you like it, keep it. If not, generate again with a different prompt or style.

Custom Prompts

The custom prompt input lets you describe the character's physical appearance in up to 200 characters. This is layered on top of the character's existing profile data, so you don't need to repeat information from the Identity step.

Good prompts focus on visual details the AI wouldn't know from the profile alone: specific hairstyles, clothing, scars, accessories, or expressions. For example:

Silver-haired woman in a dark cloak, sharp cheekbones, knowing smile, holding a lantern

Cost

Each portrait generation costs 2,000 Genesis Tokens. It's intentionally affordable so you can experiment freely. Try different styles and prompts until you find the portrait that feels right for your character.

Preset Portraits

If you don't want to generate a custom portrait, you can choose from a library of preset portraits. There are 2 preset portraits per genre category (Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Literary, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, and Other), giving you 20 presets to choose from.

Preset portraits are available on all plans, including Starter. They're a great option when you want a quick visual for a character without spending tokens.

The Portrait Library

Every portrait you generate is saved to your portrait library. The library persists across sessions and is organized by style, so you can easily find and reuse portraits.

• Reuse portraits — assign a saved portrait to a different character. This is useful if you generated a portrait that doesn't fit one character but would be perfect for another.
• Delete portraits — remove portraits you no longer need to free up storage space.
• Browse by style — filter your library by portrait style to find the look you want.

Your portrait library — all generated portraits saved and organized by style

Where Portraits Appear

Once assigned, your character's portrait shows up in several places:

• Character cards in your library and in the writer's left panel.
• Character detail sheets when you open a character's full profile.
• Character chat — the portrait appears at the top of the chat window.
• The Marketplace — if you publish your character, the portrait is the first thing other writers see.
• AI generation context is not affected by portraits — they're purely visual.

Storage & Quotas

Portrait images count against your plan's storage quota. Each portrait is a WebP image that typically weighs between 50–150 KB, so they won't eat into your storage quickly. Even so, it's good practice to delete portraits you're not using.

Next Steps

• Creating Characters — the full walkthrough of the creation wizard, including the portrait step.
• Character Marketplace — see how portraits display when you publish a character.
• Storage & Quotas — understand how portrait storage fits into your plan limits.