Chibi Maker

How to make a chibi of yourself

1. Upload one clear photo: your face in good light, ideally down to the waist so the outfit shows. A pet photo works the same way.
2. Pick Chibi character, Chibi avatar or Chibi emotes.
3. Click Generate and download the PNG. Not quite you? Run it again; every try is drawn fresh.

Three kinds of chibi

• Chibi character: The whole body as a cute chibi: a big head, a small round body, clean anime lines, a plain background.
• Chibi avatar: A square head-and-shoulders chibi for a profile picture, on a plain background.
• Chibi emotes: Nine chibi faces in a 3×3 sheet on a transparent background: happy, laughing, love, surprised, sad, crying, angry, sleepy and a wink.

The full-body chibi is the one people print as a sticker or put on a phone case. The avatar is cut for a round profile picture, so the head fills the square. The emote sheet gives you one character with nine moods, for a stream, a Discord server or a group chat.

Photos that make the best chibis

• Face the camera. A chibi is mostly head, so the face carries the likeness. A side profile or sunglasses leave the model guessing at the eyes, and the eyes are the biggest thing in a chibi.
• Daylight beats a dark room. In dim light, hair and clothes lose their color, and the chibi gets the muddy version.
• Show the outfit. For the full-body chibi, a photo down to the waist or the knees gives it your real clothes. A face-only selfie still works; the model then picks simple clothes in your colors.
• Keep what makes you you. Glasses, freckles, a fringe, a beard, a favorite hat: they all survive the trip, so wear them if they're part of how people picture you.
• Pets: get down to their eye level and fill the frame. Patterns on the fur, like a white chest or one dark ear, come through in the chibi.

An AI chibi generator, not a dress-up game

Most chibi character creators are dress-up games: you start from a blank doll and click through hair, eyes and clothes until it looks a bit like you. It's fun, and it takes a while, and the result is still a stock face. Here the photo does that work. The model reads your face shape, hairstyle, glasses, freckles and what you're wearing, and draws a chibi with all of it, in clean anime lines and soft shading.

Chibi emotes for Twitch and Discord

An emote maker usually means drawing nine faces by hand or paying an artist per emote. The Chibi emotes button gives you happy, laughing, love, surprised, sad, crying, angry, sleepy and a wink, all the same character, on one sheet with a transparent background, each with a thin white sticker outline so it reads on dark and light chat themes. Cut them apart and save each at 112, 56 and 28 pixels for Twitch, or 128 for Discord.

Take your chibi further

Making a game? The AI sprite sheet generator turns the same photo into a small pixel chibi with 25 frames of walking, jumping or waving. For a pixel portrait instead, try image to pixel art, and for a character from words alone, the AI pixel art generator. Want die-cut stickers rather than a chibi? That's the AI sticker maker.