I like to pepper my character biographies with a portrait image of individual characters. It helps me to bring these characters more to life than just a character description.
Problem: I’m terrible at drawing but prefer the portrait drawing to a time-consuming search through countless pictures of people on the internet and at the end still not find what I was looking for.
A while ago, I’ve found an iOS app - FaceDrawHD - that allows me to create an individual face from predefined facial elements. There are certain shortcomings of this app: the elements such as hairstyles, eyes, lips, etc. are limited and factors such as age and period of time are nearly impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it allows me to create a reasonable draft portrait of my fictional characters:
However, the app is no longer available in the iOS store and with the recent changes in iTunes for macOS (removal of the iOS App Store), I feel that some point in the (hopefully not too) near future I will no longer be able to use this application.
Is anyone aware of any alternative “drawing applications” out there that allows the less talented drawing artists to come up with a satisfying character portrait?
Or is there even a need for a new application on the Mac/Windows to fill that gap? After all, fictional writing needs fictional characters and having a drawing of these characters at ones disposal is a great help.