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What makes an AI character recognisable? Notes on three public designs

2026-10-11 · OpenStela

An AI character is recognisable when something about it survives a change of scene. Put it in a car wash, a subway station or a rainy street, and a viewer should still say "that's her" before reading the caption. Designers get there in different ways. Some build a shape you can read from across the room. Some fix a handful of small details that are either there or not. Some let the clothes and objects do the talking.

This post looks at three public characters on the OpenStela registry that each lean on a different one of those approaches: Odile Blanchard, Vesna Grey and June Marigold. These are design notes, not reviews. We describe what each design relies on and how its holder documented it. We do not say which is better, and the registry itself does not grade pictures.

What these notes are based on

Everything here comes from the characters' public pages on the market: the reference images, the one-line description, the short list of visible identity markers, and the works bound to each character. That is all a visitor can see. The full specification behind each character, with its silhouette, structure, surface, palette and never-list, is not public. It is a deliverable that would go to a buyer on a sale, so some of what makes these designs hold together is simply not visible to us or to you.

To keep the notes comparable, we use the four layers from our character pack specification:

Every character uses all four. The interesting part is which one carries the weight.

A few ground rules for showcase posts. We only feature characters and works their holders made public on OpenStela, under Section 4E of the Terms, credited by display name and linked to the public page. We skip characters whose reference images could read as a recognisable real person, even when they are public. And one disclosure: Section 3 of the Terms says OpenStela may run accounts, including under pen names, that publish characters it creates itself; their records are made and anchored the same way as anyone else's. Display names here are shown exactly as the pages show them.

Odile Blanchard: the silhouette does the work

Odile Blanchard, held by Monolith Archive, is described on her page as "a serene woman with a cloud of white hair who blows giant soap bubbles in the most serious places."

Look at her reference images and the first thing you notice is that you barely need her face. Three shapes stack on top of each other: a white cloud of hair wider than her shoulders, a pair of round black sunglasses, and a lavender cape coat with a tall stiff collar. Shrink the image to a thumbnail and the outline is still unmistakable.

A few things in the documentation are worth noticing:

• The hair marker describes a shape, not a style. The first listed marker is a "solid white cloud-shaped spherical bouffant" that extends "wider than the shoulders and completely concealing the hairline." Width relative to the shoulders is something you can check by eye.
• The coat marker describes how it is built. "Oversized stiff upturned standing collar and side slits" is construction, not mood. Our spec page explains why that matters: image models hold colour easily and lose structure, so a coat described only by its colour tends to come back as a different coat in the same colour.
• The palette is nearly one colour. Lavender coat, matching lavender gloves to the elbow, white hair, black lenses. With so few colours, any stray one is easy to spot.
• The gag is a repeatable action. Giant soap bubbles "in the most serious places" gives every scene the same structure. The bound works follow it: a bubble over a crosswalk, a bubble on a train platform, a bubble in a meeting, plus a short video of the crosswalk scene.

Her character reference sheet, registered as a work on its own, shows six head angles (front, deadpan front, three-quarter both ways, both profiles) and four action poses, one of them blowing a bubble with a wand. The action poses are part of the identity here, not decoration.

Vesna Grey: four small markers you can answer yes or no

Vesna Grey, held by Lumen & Lyre, is "a quiet bassist-singer who says little offstage and everything through a red bass on rainy nights."

Her silhouette is ordinary on purpose: long straight black hair, black clothes, slim build. If you shrank her to a thumbnail she could be many people. What makes her Vesna sits at close range, in four listed markers:

1. Blunt micro bangs cut straight across, one to two centimetres above the eyebrows.
2. Pale skin with faint freckles across the nose and cheeks.
3. Sharp black winged cat-eye eyeliner on both upper lids.
4. A narrow black choker with a small silver crescent moon pointing down.

Each one can be checked with a yes or a no. Our spec page calls that the single most useful test for a marker: if two people could disagree about whether an image contains it, it is not a marker. "Moody" would fail. "A crescent pointing down" passes.

The images add a second layer of signals that are not in the listed markers: a white streak in the hair, striped tights, a distressed black knit sweater. And then there is the bass. The palette is black, grey and pale skin, so a red bass is the one saturated object in most frames. It is in the one-line description too, which ties the colour to the character's story rather than to a single picture.

Her reference sheet covers front, three-quarter, side and back views, three performance poses, and a row of expressions. The bound works keep her in a narrow range of settings: a vocal booth, a basement club, a walk home after rain. There is also a theme track, registered as audio.

June Marigold: costume and props carry the name

June Marigold, also held by Lumen & Lyre, is "a sunflower-guitar country singer who writes love songs from the cab of an old turquoise pickup."

Her face is naturalistic: wavy golden-blonde hair, hazel-green eyes, a wide smile. Three of her four listed markers describe that face. The fourth is the most specific: a prominent dimple on the right cheek when she smiles. A side-specific detail like that is easy to check and easy to lose, and naming the side is what makes it checkable.

Most of the identity, though, rides on what she wears and carries:

• An acoustic guitar with a sunflower painted on the body. The name, the guitar and one of the settings all point at the same flower.
• A fringed cream jacket over a denim shirt, jeans, and embroidered cowboy boots. The outfit stays the same from the studio portrait to the stage.
• A turquoise pickup truck, named in the one-line description and in the title of one of the works.

The warm, golden palette runs through all of it. The bound works are scenes built from those props: in a sunflower field, in her pickup, on a small honky-tonk stage, plus a theme track. Her reference sheet goes full body first, front, side and back, then poses, including one seated on a hay bale with the guitar, then a row of face close-ups.

The trade-off is a familiar one in character design. When props carry the identity, a scene without the props has to lean on the face. That is not a judgement on this design, just the pressure every prop-led character lives with.

The reference sheets, and what the records say

All three holders did the same thing first: they registered a character reference sheet as a work and bound it to the character. That sheet is the closest thing on a public page to a design document. It shows the angles and poses the designer considered part of the character, and it carries its own fingerprint and date.

Here is what the records on these three pages actually state:

• Registration. All three characters were issued their IDs on October 5, 2026, and anchored in that night's batch at 19:20 UTC. Each has one specification version so far.
• Works. Each has five public works bound to it, all anchored. The work records say who registered them, when, and what the registrant says they contributed.
• AI declared. Every work is marked as AI-generated. The registrants list Higgsfield as the tool, naming Nano Banana Pro for the images, Kling 3.0 image-to-video for the videos and Sonilo Music for the theme tracks. For the reference sheets, the contribution field reads "Concept, character design brief, prompt writing, selection and curation of the final sheet." For AI-generated work that field is required, and it goes into the anchored record.
• Listing. All three are in showcase mode: not for sale, contact the holder if interested.

What the records do not say matters just as much. Each character page states that the record proves the specification has existed on the platform, unaltered, since its registration date. It does not prove that the holder is the author, that the content infringes no one, or that the holder has the right to sell it. What an ID proves goes into those limits, and Someone copied my AI character covers what a dated record is useful for if a dispute comes up.

If you want to try any of these approaches on your own character, registering one is free for up to 50 characters per account, with 300 MB for uploaded works. How to register an AI character walks through it, and our post on virtual singers' catalogues shows what the resulting public page looks like.