Hand-Painted Anime Portrait — trending format for images & thumbnails

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Restyle a personal photo as a soft, hand-painted anime film still, keeping the same people, pose and setting.

What it does

A family or couple photo restyled as a warm, hand-painted anime film frame, keeping the people, pose, clothes and setting recognizable. In March 2025 one post of the recipe reached 53M views and set off the wave during which, per Sam Altman, OpenAI added a million users in an hour. An agent takes the photo, runs a style-transfer edit on GPT Image 2.5 or Nano Banana 2.1 with a generic style description (painted backgrounds, soft cel shading, warm light), and can offer a short living-photo pass.

Status

A format people ask for that has no dedicated skill yet. Make it with the skills on the use-case pages below, or with varg directly.

Example: https://x.com/GrantSlatton/status/1904631016356274286

How an agent would make it: One photo → style-transfer edit with a generic painted-anime style description (GPT Image 2.5 / Nano Banana 2.1) → optional subtle living-photo animation

Models it drives: gpt_image_2_5, nano_banana_2_1

Example output

https://skills.varg.ai/previews/want-anime-portrait-from-photo.webp — The post that set off the March 2025 wave: the author's beach photo with his wife and their corgi, redrawn as a warm hand-painted anime film frame (output only; the original photo in the post is left out) (credit: Grant Slatton (@GrantSlatton), https://x.com/GrantSlatton/status/1904631016356274286)

Used for

More images & thumbnails skills

Run the generation on varg

varg is one API key for the models these skills drive — Seedance 2.5, Kling 4, Veo 3.1, Wan 3, Nano Banana 2.1, GPT Image 2.5, ElevenLabs v4 and 200+ more — billed in credits, with a cost estimate before anything runs.