Japanese Handdrawn Illustrations

🇬🇧 English · 🇨🇳 简体中文 · 🇯🇵 日本語 · 🇫🇷 Français · 🇰🇷 한국어

One-click multilingual showcase: open the live translation page

A Codex skill for turning Chinese articles, notes, teaching materials, and workflow documents into quiet Japanese editorial-style hand-drawn illustrations.

Instead of using a single mega prompt, this project packages a reusable visual workflow: style DNA, a recurring character, composition patterns, prompt templates, and QA rules.

Multilingual Experience

GitHub README files cannot run JavaScript, so this repository provides two translation layers:

• README language links: click a flag above to open the translated README.
• Live showcase page: use the GitHub Pages page for instant in-page language switching.

Why This Project

Most AI image prompts are fragile. They work once, drift quickly, and are hard to reuse across articles.

This skill makes the illustration process more maintainable:

• Reusable visual system: not just a prompt, but a small structured skill.
• Consistent character IP: the recurring character 小旅人 anchors the style.
• Article-first workflow: starts from the article's cognitive anchor, not random decoration.
• Built-in QA: prevents common failures such as anime drift, PPT-like diagrams, overfilled layouts, and unreadable labels.
• Chinese-content friendly: optimized for Chinese handwritten labels and Chinese article illustrations.
• Lightweight structure: easy to fork, edit, and adapt for your own visual language.

Demo Images

Skill system	Workflow	Prompt cards	QA guardrail

What It Generates

The default output style is:

• 16:9 horizontal article illustrations
• pure white or very pale warm off-white background
• thin black hand-drawn line art
• sparse muted watercolor accents
• lots of empty space
• short Chinese handwritten labels
• a quiet recurring traveler figure, 小旅人

The skill explicitly avoids:

• anime or manga style
• big-eyed characters
• children's picture-book look
• commercial poster illustration
• PPT infographics
• dense system diagrams
• imitation of any specific artist or animation studio

Skill Structure

skills/japanese-handdrawn-illustrations/
├── SKILL.md
├── agents/openai.yaml
├── references/
│   ├── style-dna.md
│   ├── character-ip.md
│   ├── composition-patterns.md
│   ├── prompt-template.md
│   └── qa-checklist.md
└── assets/examples/

How It Works

1. Read the article or note.
2. Identify the cognitive anchors worth illustrating.
3. Draft a short shot list.
4. Generate each image as a standalone 16:9 illustration.
5. Check the image against the QA checklist.
6. Save final assets with stable filenames.

Install

Copy the skill folder into your Codex skills directory:

cp -R "skills/japanese-handdrawn-illustrations" "$HOME/.codex/skills/"

Then start a new Codex session and invoke:

Use $japanese-handdrawn-illustrations to design and generate Japanese hand-drawn illustrations for this Chinese article.

Example Use Cases

• Chinese blog post illustrations
• Obsidian or Notion knowledge notes
• medical education explainers
• learning notes and study workflows
• creator workflow diagrams
• lifestyle essays
• methodology articles

Example Prompts

See examples/example-prompts.md.

Project Notes

This project was adapted from the structure of ian-xiaohei-illustrations, but uses an independent visual system:

• default character: 小旅人
• background: pure white or very pale warm off-white
• mood: quiet Japanese editorial notebook sketch
• colors: muted watercolor accents
• QA goal: clear, gentle, article-friendly illustrations

For a Chinese project explanation and positioning notes, see docs/project-positioning.zh-CN.md.

License

MIT