One of the terms you’ll hear in the writing community is a “face claim.”
Face claims are extremely useful, but they can be hard to find. In today’s post, I’m going to share some of the best ways to find helpful, realistic face claims for your characters.
Let’s start off by answering the question, “What is a faceclaim?”
What is a Face Claim?
Simply put, a face claim is a picture or person who looks as close to your character as possible.
You can use it to keep track of your character’s looks throughout the story. It’s also a good reference if you hire an artist to draw your characters.
Face claims are a lot of fun to look for. Here are some of my tips and tricks to help you find the perfect face claim for your characters.
1. Use Pinterest
If you aren’t using Pinterest yet, what are you doing?
Seriously, Pinterest is probably the best place to find face claims on the internet. It’s free to use, and easy to set up.
You can also organize your face claims into different folders.
I keep my face claim pictures organized by the story. So all of my characters from my first novel are together, and all the characters from my second novel are in a different folder.
Another great thing about using Pinterest is that the algorithm is trying to help you.
How to Use Pinterest to Find Face Claims
Here’s how to use Pinterest to find face claims:
- Start off by searching for “character inspiration” and then your character’s gender. If I’m looking for a woman, I search, “character inspiration woman.”
You’ll see different ages for different keywords.
Searching for “character inspiration male” brings up dudes from 18-30 or so.
“Character inspiration female” is also in that 18-30 age range.
If you want kids, replace “female” with “girl,” “little girl,” “young girl,” etc.
So if you’re looking for a face claim for a ten year old, don’t waste your time scrolling through the 30 year olds that come up when you search for “character inspiration female.”
Here’s what I found for “character inspiration young man ginger,” minus the ads.
- Scroll through the results and see if you find anything promising.
- If you find a picture you like, click on it and scroll down to see the related pictures. This is where the rabbit trails begin.
- As you click on pictures that look more and more similar to your character, keep scrolling through those related pictures and see what comes up. The longer you search, the better your chances.
- When you find a couple pictures that you like, save them in a folder. It’s okay if they’re not perfect. We’re aiming for “close enough.”
- Once you have a few pictures saved in the folder, go to your profile and look in that folder. When you click the button that says “More Like This,” you should see a lot more pictures recommended.
Pinterest, like any social media, gets smarter the more you use it. So after you use it for a while, the algorithm will be on your side.
Now let’s talk about the next method of finding face claims, Artbreeder.
2. Create a Face Claim with Artbreeder
If you’ve been around my blog for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about this website called Artbreeder.
Artbreeder is an AI website that lets you create your own character art and portraits. It’s free to use, and you can connect it to your Google account, or create an Artbreeder account.
Since they recently changed the layout, I’m still not super familiar with the new website.
In all honesty, this is one of the websites that I like to spend four hours just playing around with. I’m not an Artbreeder expert, by any means.
So to help you guys out, here is a really good tutorial by Samson Vowles on YouTube. I’ll post the link, and you can feel free to watch his tutorial so you get a good idea on how the website works:
Quick disclaimer: I do not own this video. I’m simply reposting the link to help educate others. I highly recommend going to YouTube and leaving a nice comment on this video, as it is one of the best Artbreeder tutorials I’ve found so far.
My number one tip for Artbreeder is to save every picture that you like. You can never have too many pictures of your character.
Another tip: play around with all of the sliders, even if you think you won’t need them. All of the options will give your pictures a slightly different look. You can always click the “Reset” button to start over if you mess up.
All images from Artbreeder are free to use, so you can include them in your creative projects, as long as you credit Artbreeder.com.
Once you’ve found some images from Artbreeder that you like, you can save them to your computer. From there, you can upload them to Pinterest, or just keep them on your desktop for future reference.
3. Draw Your Own Face Claim
We’ve gone through Pinterest and Artbreeder. Most authors can find a face claim by this point.
However, if you’re still struggling to find what you’re looking for, the third (and least restricting) option is yourself.
Grab a paper and pencil and get to work.
Unless you are a freakishly amazing artist, your drawings won’t be too good at first. That’s okay. As long as you can tell what you’ve drawn, that’s all that matters.
If you want to learn how to draw faces for your characters, or if you want to brush up your drawing skills, here are a couple of websites that I found really helpful:
- https://rapidfireart.com/2017/10/24/how-to-draw-faces-for-beginners-easy/ is a great face drawing tutorial that is beginner friendly. If you want to keep things even more simple, just skip the vertical lines under the eyes and estimate how big you want the nose.
- https://www.wikihow.com/Draw-Cartoon-Characters is a basic guide to drawing cartoon characters, which might be easier than drawing a “realistic” portrait.
- And if you want to see how I learned to draw faces, here’s the YouTube video that I learned from. It’s very simple and lets you sketch the face, without as much emphasis on detail. https://youtu.be/tzWA7JHai9g?t=40
Drawing is a different skillset than writing, so it might take a while to learn and practice. It is very fun and rewarding, and a great way to get faceclaims for your characters.
After all, when you’re drawing, the sky is the limit. You can create whatever you want!
There are lots of fun ways to find a face claim for your character. You can use one method, or a mix of all three.
Once you find that face claim, it can really help you picture your character, and keep track of their appearance in the story.
How do you find and organize face claims? Any tips or tricks I should try? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back soon with a new post.
I’m always so jealous of my friends who can draw! I love having visuals of my characters, but it’s so hard to get it just right. These links and resources are super helpful. I intend to play around with them when winter break finally arrives!
True! I only draw once every six months or so, and I’m not good at it, but it’s still something that you can enjoy even if you’re not “good” at it. Just like writing, if it brings you joy, that’s all that matters! Also, thanks for the comment! Yours was the 300th comment on this site, and I’ve been stuck at 299 for weeks XD Hope you have fun with the Artbreeder site 🙂
But what if you find a picture on pinterest, and the person in the picture finds it and gets mad you used their picture?
Thanks for the comment Dash! Most of the pictures you’ll find on Pinterest are owned/copyrighted by someone. You’re allowed to keep them in a Pinterest board for your own personal use, but you can’t publish them elsewhere. The faceclaim is just for your own personal reference, so there shouldn’t be any problem with that. And in the rare case that Pinterest has to take an image down, you’ll get an email about it from them!
If you’re looking for a faceclaim that’s not copyrighted (to use for a book cover or something similar), check out Pexels.com and Pixabay.com. Their photos are under a CC license which means you can publish the pictures anywhere, as long as you give credit to the photographer!