How to Make Consistent Characters in Midjourney

Why characters drift

Midjourney does not remember people between prompts. Each image is generated fresh from your words, parameters and any references, so small changes in wording, angle, outfit or lighting can produce someone who looks like a cousin rather than the same person. Faces drift most, followed by hair, proportions and clothing details.

No single trick solves this. Consistency comes from stacking several controls so there is less room for the model to improvise. The techniques below work across recent versions and can be combined.

Technique 1: a fixed, detailed description

Write the character once, in a specific order, and paste it unchanged into every prompt. Vague words like "a young woman" invite a different person every time. Distinctive, concrete details give the model something to hold on to.

• Identity basics: approximate age, build, skin tone.
• Face: face shape, eye colour, eyebrows, nose, freckles, scars.
• Hair: colour, length, texture, a signature style.
• Signature clothing: one or two items that always appear, such as a mustard raincoat or round brass glasses.
• Rendering style: the medium and look, which should not change between images.

Example character block:

Mara, a woman in her early thirties, narrow face, light brown skin, dark green eyes, thick straight eyebrows, short asymmetric black bob, small scar through her left eyebrow, mustard yellow raincoat, round brass glasses

Then vary only the scene around it:

• Mara, a woman in her early thirties, narrow face, light brown skin, dark green eyes, thick straight eyebrows, short asymmetric black bob, small scar through her left eyebrow, mustard yellow raincoat, round brass glasses, waiting at a rainy tram stop at night, cinematic still --ar 16:9 --style raw
• Mara, a woman in her early thirties, narrow face, light brown skin, dark green eyes, thick straight eyebrows, short asymmetric black bob, small scar through her left eyebrow, mustard yellow raincoat, round brass glasses, reading in a crowded library, warm lamp light, cinematic still --ar 16:9 --style raw

Keeping the character block at the start of the prompt gives it more weight than the scene.

Technique 2: image prompts of your character

Once you have one image of the character you like, use it as an image prompt. Place its URL at the start of later prompts, followed by your character block and the new scene. Raise --iw if the character is drifting and lower it if every image starts copying the original pose and background.

Tips for reference images:

1. Pick a clear, well-lit image where the face is visible and unobstructed.
2. Crop to the character so the background does not dominate.
3. Build a small set: a front view, a three-quarter view and a full-body shot.
4. Upscale your best images so you have clean references to reuse.

Image prompts carry composition as well as identity, so expect some of the original framing to leak through. That is the trade-off.

Technique 3: lock the look with style references and seeds

A character can be the same person yet feel inconsistent because the rendering changes: one image is painterly, the next glossy. A style reference fixes the visual language so your character always lives in the same world. Use the same --sref image or code, at the same --sw, across the whole series.

A --seed can also help. Reusing a seed with a near-identical prompt gives a similar starting point, which is useful for small changes like a different expression. It will not hold a character across very different scenes on its own, so treat it as a fine-tuning tool rather than the main method. See our seeds guide for how they behave.

Dedicated character reference features

In some versions Midjourney has offered a dedicated character reference, and later an omni reference, designed specifically to carry a person or object from a reference image into new images. When available, these are usually the strongest single tool for consistency, especially for faces.

Because these features have changed between model versions, including how they are called and which versions support them, check Midjourney's current documentation before relying on them. Two practical notes apply whatever the version:

• They work best with a clean reference of the character, so the reference set you built in technique 2 is still worth having.
• They combine with everything else here. A dedicated reference, a fixed description and a fixed style reference together beat any one of them alone.

Keep a character sheet

Professionals keep a character sheet, and you should too. It turns consistency from memory into a copy-and-paste routine. Store, for each character:

1. The exact character block text.
2. Links to your best reference images: front, three-quarter, full body.
3. The style reference code or URL and the --sw value.
4. Any seed that produced a good base image.
5. Parameters you always use, such as --ar, --style raw or --s.
6. A "do not change" list: features that must appear in every image.

You can also ask Midjourney for a turnaround to populate the sheet:

character turnaround sheet of Mara, a woman in her early thirties, short asymmetric black bob, mustard yellow raincoat, round brass glasses, front view, side view and back view, plain light grey background, clean concept art --ar 3:2

Expect to curate. Generate several grids, keep the images that match, and discard the rest. Consistency is partly selection.

Doing this faster with Dreamdrive

My Prompts auto-saves every prompt into project folders, so a character's working prompts stay together, searchable and one click from reuse. Style Vault stores the --sref codes you use for a series with preview images, so the look stays the same from scene to scene.

Frequently asked questions