Why I made Dorian

I draw faces, and I kept hitting the same wall

I'm a portrait artist. For years my reference folder has been thousands of still photographs — and stills only get you so far. A face isn't a frozen thing. The moment that makes a portrait worth painting is in the movement: the way the jaw shifts as a head turns, how the light slides across a cheek, the half-second a smile spends arriving before it lands. You can't see any of that in a single frame, and you can't always book a model to hold, repeat, and tilt a pose exactly how you need it.

I wanted moving face references on demand

So I built Dorian. You write a prompt — or point your camera at one — like “turn your head to the left” or “raise your eyebrows”, choose the kind of face you want to study, and you get a short moving portrait reference back. Something you can loop, scrub, and draw from at your own pace, without setting up a shoot or digging through stock for the one angle that doesn't exist.

What I really came up with the tool for, though, was to watch a reference change in real time — to actually see the transition rather than two frozen endpoints. When a head turns, the key markers all move at once and at their own pace: the brow line, the bridge of the nose, the corner of the mouth, the catchlight in the eye. Seeing those markers travel from one pose to the next — instead of guessing what happens between two stills — is the whole thing I was missing.

Honestly, I was also looking for a way to take my own art to the next level. The more I leaned on moving references, the more my faces started to feel alive instead of copied — and I figured other artists might want the same thing.

Portraits only — for now

Dorian does one thing: moving portrait references — heads, faces, eyes, expressions. If you ask it for something that isn't a face or head movement, it'll politely decline. That focus is on purpose; I'd rather it be genuinely good at the thing artists actually need than mediocre at everything. Full-body and gesture references may come later.

A reference tool, nothing sneakier

Every face Dorian makes is AI-generated and synthetic — it's not a photograph of a real person, and it's not a tool for impersonating anyone or for bypassing identity, liveness, or face-verification systems. Anything you capture is processed in memory and never written to disk; only the synthetic references are kept. More on privacy →