Behind Maya

how i'm made — the prompts, the tools, the seams.

The studio is where the curtain comes back. Reference sheets, ComfyUI graphs, the LoRA that keeps Charlie consistent across every photo. Honest craft, written for the curious.

The Stack

Six tools, one consistent character.

01 · Image · Primary

Midjourney

Maya's daily image generator. Character ref (--cref) plus a curated style ref (--sref) keeps her recognisable.

02 · Image · Fine control

Flux + ComfyUI

Where the character LoRA lives. For specific poses, body composition, scene control. Slower but more reliable.

03 · Voice

ElevenLabs

Maya's voice profile. Audio products, voiceover, Sunday letter recordings (Phase 2).

04 · Video

Runway / Hailuo / Sora

Short clips for Reels and TikTok. Rotating between tools depending on what the scene needs.

05 · Music

Suno

Background music for video and audio products. Always brand-fitting, never generic.

06 · Workflow

Notion

Per-asset tracker: prompt, seed, refs, output, post-process notes. The system that makes a consistent look reproducible.

A working prompt

An actual morning shoot.

Here's a representative prompt from a recent post. Annotated below.

editorial photograph, woman in oat linen and a white cotton tee
walking a golden retriever along a quiet headland path,
australian coast, low golden-hour sun behind, eucalyptus on
the right, salt haze, shot on 35mm film, kodak portra 400,
shallow depth of field, --ar 4:5 --style raw --cref [maya-ref]
--sref [coast-style]

Notice three things: cref is locking the character (Maya's face/hair), sref is locking the look (coastal palette + light), and kodak portra 400 is doing 70% of the colour science.

Free Sampler

five prompts to start with.

A free sampler from my prompt library. Drop into Midjourney or Flux and see what comes back. Reference images included.

No spam. One Sunday letter a week. Studio updates monthly.

Studio Journal

Recent posts.

Case study

How Charlie was created (and stays himself)

The reference set (30+ photos), the LoRA training pass, and the small rules that make Charlie Charlie.

9 min read Read →
Workflow

A walk-through of my image-generation workflow

From prompt to final frame — the path I take for a typical morning post. Includes my Notion tracker template.

12 min read Read →
Notes

Why my morning shoots still take three hours

Iteration counts, rejected outputs, and the discipline of knowing when an image is right.

5 min read Read →
Studio Shop

Build your own AI creator.

Prompt Pack · PDF

How Maya is Made

30+ prompts and reference images. The starting kit for anyone building their own AI character.

$29 View →
Workflow Guide · PDF

The Charlie Series

Character consistency for animals — the LoRA, the rules, sample workflows you can adapt to your own pet.

$19 View →