When Characters Look Different Between Pages

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Most reports of "my character keeps changing" come down to one of a handful of causes, and they are worth ruling out in order. The first two account for the majority, and neither is about the drawing itself.

1. Is the character actually assigned to that page? Open the page and look at the Characters in Scene row. If they are not there, the illustrator was never given their face and drew a stranger instead.
2. Did the art style change partway through the book? See Changing Your Art Style.
3. Then work through the sections below by symptom.

Before spending a redraw on any of this: under the page image, Previous versions puts an earlier image back at no cost. Get the old picture back first, fix the cause, then redraw.

A Character Is Missing, or a Stranger Is Drawn Instead

The page has no character assigned to it. Without one, there is no face to work from, so a person gets invented for the scene. The story text naming someone is not enough on its own; the name has to be attached to the page.

Fix: open the page and add them to Characters in Scene. Where a name appears in your text but is not in the cast, the row flags it with "Mentioned on this page, tap to include", so that is the fastest thing to scan for.

You may also see "Some characters wouldn't be in the pictures" before illustrating. That is this same check, run across the whole book at once. Add them & illustrate is almost always the right answer.

Someone Is in Scenes They Were Never Written Into

The opposite problem, and it looks like a drawing fault rather than a setup one. A character appears in page after page that never mentions them: standing in the background of a scene they have nothing to do with, or turning up twice in the same picture.

Pages draw whoever is listed in Characters in Scene, whether or not the words on the page mention them. So a character left on a page is drawn into it, faithfully, every time.

This is worth checking first when it is happening across most of the book rather than on one page. A character who is on nearly every page while the story only names them occasionally was almost certainly added to all of them at once rather than page by page.

Fix: open a page where they do not belong and remove them from Characters in Scene. Changing the list is free and takes effect the next time that page is drawn. Fix the list on every affected page before redrawing any of them, so you pay once.

If you are not sure which pages are wrong, ask the assistant to check the book's character lists for you. It reads every page against its own words and reports both directions, characters who are missing and characters who should not be there, and that check costs nothing.

The Story Gives a Character a New Name Partway Through

A stray dog called "Puppy" who the family names "Bear" on page 18. A character introduced as "the old woman" who becomes "Grandma Ruth".

Pages are matched to characters by the name saved on the character. Once your story starts calling someone something else, the match stops finding them, so they drop off the pages after the rename and a different-looking version gets drawn instead.

Fix: open the character and add the other name under Also called. A character can hold several. Both names then match, and the pages after the rename pick them up again. This is free, and no redraw is needed until you want the existing pictures updated.

One Character Comes Out With Several Different Faces

This usually traces back to the photo. If the photo used to create the character has more than one person in it, all of those faces get learned as one character, and each page then draws a different blend of them.

Fix: create a separate character for each person, each from a photo of that person alone. Crop a group photo down before uploading it.

Two Characters Keep Getting Swapped

Names do real work here. Two characters called the same thing, or left on a default like "New Character", cannot be told apart when a page is drawn, and very generic names are ambiguous enough to be skipped.

Fix: give everyone a distinct name that is used in the story text.

Their Clothes Change on Every Page

Character notes are read as a description of how someone looks, not as an instruction to carry out. A note phrased as a command, such as "change shirt to flowers", is re-interpreted every time a page is drawn, so you get a different flowered shirt each time.

Fix: describe the finished look instead. "Cream sweater with small pink flowers" holds still across the book.

Something From the Photo Follows Them Everywhere

A graduation cap, sunglasses, a party hat, a costume. Anything worn in the reference photo is treated as part of how that character looks, and it will keep appearing.

Fix: use a photo in everyday clothes as the character's portrait. Editing the text alone will not usually shift it, because the picture is the stronger signal.

Hair or Eye Colour Drifts

The details on the character (hair colour, eye colour, and so on) work alongside the photo. When the two disagree, pages can settle on either one, and different pages may settle differently.

Fix: open the character and check those fields against the photo you uploaded, so the two are telling the same story.

A Pet Looks Like the Wrong Animal

Pets need their species and breed filled in. Left empty, the drawing drifts toward a generic animal, and a breed name on its own can pull in stereotyped features the animal in your photo does not have.

Ready-made animals from the character library are also drawn characters in their own right, some of them wearing clothes and standing upright. They stay that way, so one of those in a photographic book will look hand-drawn next to everyone else.

Fix: fill in species and breed. For a photographic book, build the pet from your own photo rather than picking a drawn one from the library.

Too Many Characters on One Page

The more characters share a page, the less room there is for each one, and the ones added last tend to be the ones that drift.

Fix: keep a page's cast to the characters the scene actually needs. If someone is only mentioned in passing, leave them out of that page's cast.

Redrawing Gives a Different Picture, Not a Better One

Redrawing with nothing changed produces another interpretation of the same instructions. If the cause is still in place, the new picture has the same problem in a new arrangement.

Fix: change something first, whether that is the page's cast, a character's notes, or the scene description. See Fixing an Illustration That Came Out Wrong.

Turn On Quality Mode

When you illustrate, Quality checks each finished page against your characters and repairs what it can before you ever see it. It takes longer than Quick and costs the same credits.

For a book with several characters, it is worth the wait.

If None of That Explains It

Some of what shapes a character is written when the character is first created, from the photo, and it is not something you can edit afterwards. When a character is consistently drawn as someone they are not, and you have ruled out the causes above, that is usually why.

Use Report a problem on the page. That marks the redraw free, tells us what went wrong, and lets us look at the character directly.