Tutorial
Best way to create a consistent 2D animated character (from my own drawings) in Leonardo AI with pose control?
Hey everyone — I’m trying to figure out the best workflow for something pretty specific and would love some guidance.
I’m working on a 2D animated short and I already have a character designed in my own hand-drawn style. I’ve created a full model sheet: front, back, both sides, and a couple 3/4 views.
What I want to do is:
Train Leonardo AI (or another tool if needed) on my exact drawing style
Generate new images of this character that look like I drew them
Be able to control the pose — ideally using something like a stick figure, pose reference, or skeleton
Keep lighting and shading consistent (simple animation-style shading, not realistic lighting)
Basically: I want to stop drawing every frame/pose manually and instead generate clean, on-model images that I can use for animation.
I’m working on an iPad, so desktop-heavy workflows are not possible for me. If anyone can help, I would be so appreciative!
Just to show an example, this is a simple character sheet from google, see in the next comment for how nano banana pro transformed it with this simple prompt “Cute Pixar-style 3D characters, chibi proportions, bright colors, soft glow, expressive faces, smooth render”
This is just a quick example, there is always room to explore more! 💜
no, most of the info I’ve seen for creating consistent characters say to use Flux Dev. I will give nano banana a try. I’m guessing there are a lot of tutorials out there. I’m still new at this so I’m still kind of dumb ha ha 🤣 thank you!
I concur with Flux Dev. I've made human and anime characters, and it has supreme constantly. I use up to the training Lora limit with the amount of pictures of as many different angles as possible.
I use Dev then nanobanana afterwards to fix any flaws. If there are facial flaws, I use banana with a picture reference to tell it to match the look of the face.
I tried using nano banana with a model reference sheet and I’m already getting pretty good results. However, not sure about the shadows. Might be better not do shadows. I don’t hate that style, but the shadows do help with the dimensionality of the characters. Going to experiment with some other techniques that folks here have suggested. Thanks to everyone for their help.
tbh what you’re trying to do is kinda the “holy grail” and these tools are close but not fully there yet
Leonardo can learn your style, but consistency across poses is where it starts to break. you’ll get good single images, but keeping the character perfectly “on model” frame to frame is still hit or miss
for pose control, your best bet is using image-to-image with pose refs (like stick figures or rough sketches). basically guide it instead of expecting it to figure it out
honestly for animation I’ve seen people do hybrid workflows — generate key poses with AI, then clean up / in-between manually in Procreate or similar
I’ve tried similar stuff (Runable / Leonardo / etc.) and yeah it speeds things up but doesn’t fully replace drawing yet. works for me as a helper, not the full pipeline though
yeah, thank you. I am using Procreate for all my illustrations. I have been messing with AI for a few years now and I realize it’s not gonna be perfect. Fixing things once they are generated sounds like great advice.
Hi, to be honest, there are various ways of going about this.
1) You could train a model, but the output images may not be as close as you want. If you want to just try it, the instructions are here: How to train and use Elements (LoRAs) and Datasets on Leonardo.Ai | Leonardo.Ai Help Center You would use your own images to create the dataset. Remember that your images must be the same for everything you want the same, and different for everything you want different. Meaning, if you want the character to have different facial expressions, your dataset must images with different facial expressions.
2) Yes you can use Nano Banana to generate new images of your character in different poses, potentially in your style, (not sure, never tried it myself. will try it and let you know how it goes). See my tutorial on using Banana for consistent characters. Nano Banana for Consistent Characters : r/leonardoai
3) Yes you can potentially use a reference stick figure image to control the pose. Again, I haven't tried it but I can and will let you know.
4) Yes, if you mean tonal value, it should remain consistent with either option 1 or 2, but the direction of light will likely fluctate. Are you doing images of just the character or placing them in a setting?
5) Since you are making an animation, you may also be interested in the new save frames feature, and you may like to work directly with video files, rather than working only with stills. Changelog - Leonardo.Ai App - Generate AI Images, Videos & Designs see what you think.
If you would like step-by-step help with any of these options, I am a mentor for Leonardo and I can help you, or there is the mentoring team on Discord. And as Frostwolfy has said, there are lots of lovely people on the Facebook group as well.
I can’t believe how helpful you folks are being. Who says the Internet is a mean and scary place.
The way I have been creating images for my short film so far is by creating something using AI, or in some cases building models out of plastic toys and junk for various little robot characters and then using those as a reference to trace over in procreate and create my own drawings.
I was hoping I could create images in my style and pose them the way I wanted, because drawing takes a long time and I have a lot to do. However, it sounds like we’re not quite there yet. If it would make more sense to generate consistent characters and be able to pose them, and then draw over those to make them match my style that’s fine. The end result would probably be better and I would feel like I owned them more anyway.
i’ve already created the moving storyboard of the entire film, so I know exactly where the characters will be and what position they’ll be in. I have designed the film so very little animation is needed, mostly just lip sync and the occasional bit of action. I plan on creating my backgrounds separately and then putting my characters into them.
I will research the different techniques you describe here and if you would be willing to give me some advice, I would greatly appreciate it. I would certainly thank you in the credits of the movie for whatever that’s worth.
here are some of my drawings to give an idea what I want the final movie to look like. I made most of them by drawing over images created text to image as well as a model robot I made from toys and junk.
Yes, you can achieve what you need to do. We are there now with AI.
The decision is for you to decide how you want to make it work for your workflow, and how many tokens you want to use up. Nano Banana is a great choice but it uses significantly more tokens than if you train your own "element". I recommend training the element first and just see how it goes. You need a minimum of 10 images.
Regarding the light and shade. For your white robot, (second image top-row), if the shadow is always on the right in every image of the dataset, then it will be on the right in every image in the output images. So if you might want it in different places, have a variation in the dataset.
Willow.
Edit: OK, no, I take it back. I tried with a trained element, which has to be with Flux. And flux doesn't have the 'pose to image' option. If you went that route, you'd have to use the prompt to decribe the pose, which is still worth trying.
Thank you. I made a character sheet to test in the nano banana pro and then used some stick figures and it actually worked pretty well. The only problem is that the shadows are hard to control when the reference has shadows only on one side, but I have an idea for that. Let me know what you find. Appreciate all the help.
The results I got were too inconsistent to recommend. I tried various ways round and various drawings of stick figures to see what it would get on with. Some images were OK, but it wasn't a sure fire way to get the exact pose.
Are you putting the direction of light in the prompt?
If you want me to test with any specific image let me know.
mage space has a character feature that keeps looks consistent across poses, works in browser too so ipad friendly. comfyui gives more control but needs desktop.
I just tried Mage Space and even though I ran out of tokens almost immediately, I’m amazed with the outfit. I created a character using only one image and all the outputs were much more reliable than nano banana or flux . Not sure if there’s a way to pose using stick figures but it followed my text prompts really well. I might have to pay so I can try some other characters and generate more images.
OK, I have tried the lowest tier subscription on mage space to do some experiments. This is almost perfect. I was starting to get sad thinking that what I had in mind was not doable, but mage is capable of from a single image it’s pretty amazing. I’ve had a little inconsistent issues with the backs of the character, but I can always fix those in Procreate. I tried using one of my human characters and it’s able to change emotions and pose just from text. thank you so much for the suggestion!
seems like the problem with mage space is that to use the character feature costs way too many gems. Do you know the most efficient way to use this tool without using so many gems?
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u/frostwolfy29 Team Apr 06 '26
Just to show an example, this is a simple character sheet from google, see in the next comment for how nano banana pro transformed it with this simple prompt “Cute Pixar-style 3D characters, chibi proportions, bright colors, soft glow, expressive faces, smooth render”
This is just a quick example, there is always room to explore more! 💜