Character Studies is a project that reimagines the faces of some our most beloved fictional protagonists as a collaboration with the authors who once created them.

By introducing original character descriptions into AI and combining them with paintings, these speculative portraits embed the author’s voice as a core conceit, approaching the “prompt” as an opportunity to dramatize and humanize, rather than simply optimize a visual outcome.

Included here are characters drawn from novels by Jane Austen, Colette, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, among others.