Building a Barry Character Library with AI
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
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.
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.
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.
