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Building a Barry Character Library with AI

· 3 min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Director of Innovation @ ThreeWill

I drew Barry a long time ago, and the book is finally out in paperback and on Kindle. The bigger dreams are a second book, an interactive version, and maybe someday an animated one. All of those need the same thing first: a Barry who looks like Barry every single time.

So this week my Homol Works Grok Bot and I started a character library. The approach is reference-guided generation: every new image is conditioned on my own book pages, one outfit at a time, and nothing gets kept until I approve it. My original Barry workspace stays read-only — the library copies from it, never changes it.

What happened​

  • Read through the Barry workspace and wrote a character bible from the actual pages: proportions, the hoodie, the red-and-green cap, the line quality and the palette
  • Made an approved turnaround and expression sheet in Barry's hoodie to use as the master references
  • Drew six approved outfits from the book — firefighter, hero, knight, pirate, overalls and bedtime — each checked against its own book pages
  • Introduced a brand-new outfit, Astronaut Barry, and a first scene: the moon landing Barry imagines while playing with a cardboard rocket in the backyard sandbox
  • Tried a quick trained-model (LoRA) test early on; it drifted off model (blush cheeks, puffy hoodies, orange caps), so reference-guided generation won for now

Turnaround sheet — Barry in his oversized hoodie from the front, side and back (AI-assisted from my book pages, approved by me)

Six approved outfits — firefighter, hero, knight, pirate, overalls and bedtime (AI-assisted, approved by me)

The rules that keep him Barry​

Most of the work was me saying "close, but that's not Barry." Those notes turned into rules in the bible:

  • No eyebrows when he's calm or happy — brows appear only for strong expressions
  • No whites in his eyes, even when he's excited — solid dark dots only
  • No teeth or tongue when his mouth is open — just a simple dark shape
  • The more slender proportions from the turnaround, not the chunkier figures in some of my sketches
  • Outfit details matter: the pirate's anchor patch goes on his sleeve, no hair under the bandana, and his face comes from my favorite drawing in the book (the driftwood page); the knight shows a little neck and carries a front-facing crest shield

Astronaut Barry​

Astronaut Barry is the first truly new piece. No ball cap — just spiky hair inside a hard-shell helmet that is very much not a fishbowl.

Astronaut Barry character sheet (AI-assisted, approved by me)

For the moon-landing scene I couldn't decide between a more "evolved" look and something closer to the book. I liked the inked moon, Earth and ship from the book-style version and Barry's face from the evolved one, so the final scene is literally both: the book-style background with the exact head and face from the first version blended in.

Astronaut Barry piloting a moon landing with Earth out the window (AI-assisted composite, approved by me)

Mixing an inked background with Barry's own face feels like a recipe I'll keep using. Next up: more of the Astronaut Barry story, and maybe a Halloween costume.