Somebody has to decide what a god looks like

Consistency isn't a style you get by being careful. It's a list of things that are never allowed to change.

Posted by Prabhu Manickavelu on August 22, 2026 · 7 mins read

Pinning each character to one picture stopped them wandering between panels. It also exposed the question I’d been quietly dodging: that picture has to show something, and somebody has to decide what. A face doesn’t get drawn first. It gets written down first — down to the number of arms.

Five pipeline stages in order: find the story, write the script, draw the panels, give it a voice, make it move. The first two are done, drawing the panels is the current step, and the last two are still ahead.
Where this one sits. The story is settled and cut into panels; now somebody has to be in them.

The assumption

I assumed the source material had already done this job for me. These are characters people have been depicting for centuries — a god with four arms, a serpent with seven heads, a head that floats with no body under it. Ask for a picture and you get one. The look felt like something you retrieve, not something you choose.

So the earliest character art was asked for the way you’d describe someone to a friend: a name, a sentence, a mood. What came back was fine. It was fine every single time, and fine in a slightly different way every single time.

Where it broke

A sentence is not a specification.

“Four-armed” doesn’t say what’s in the four hands. “An elder” doesn’t say how old — sixty and seventy-five are two different people. “Wears gold” doesn’t say gold where. Every gap in a description gets filled by whoever is drawing, and an unfilled gap is filled differently each time it comes up.

And the cast stops being humanoid fast. Twenty-six of the characters written down so far have no arms at all: serpents whose coiled body is the whole performance, a mountain, a poison sitting in a vessel. “Draw them consistently” means nothing until somebody has said what them is.

The insight

So a character’s look stopped being something to ask for and became something to decide — in advance, in writing, one character at a time. Not a description of them. A set of standing rules about them.

A card listing one character's fixed visual rules: four heads facing the four directions and four arms; always worn, a white dhoti and a golden garment over one shoulder; always held, a water pot, rosary, spoon and palm-leaf manuscript; an ancient elder with a short white beard; exactly four arms, four hands, two legs, two feet, four heads and eight eyes; and a fixed palette of gold, white and two earth browns.
One entry, in full. Most of it is deliberately boring — boring is what repeats.

Written this way, the last line is the one that changed how I think about it: an exact count of arms, hands, legs, heads and eyes. It reads like paperwork right up until you notice it’s the only part of a character’s look that can be settled by counting.

Bar chart of how many arms characters are written to have: two arms, 890 characters; three or four, 140; more than four, 24; none at all, 26.
Eight hundred and ninety characters are written as having two arms. That isn't a shrug — it's a decision made 890 separate times, because 'the usual number' is not something a drawing hand knows.

What it looks like now

No character has a picture without a written identity sitting behind it. And because the rules are countable, the picture can be read back against them, line by line: four heads, four arms, white cloth below, gold over one shoulder, a water pot, a rosary, a spoon, a palm-leaf manuscript, a short white beard. Not luck. The list.

Three character turnaround sheets, each showing the same figure from four angles: a four-headed elder in white and gold holding a water pot, a rosary, a spoon and a manuscript; a purple severed head with no body; and a red figure with flames rising from his head and a fan of arms holding ritual implements. Four heads, four arms
Three character turnaround sheets, each showing the same figure from four angles: a four-headed elder in white and gold holding a water pot, a rosary, a spoon and a manuscript; a purple severed head with no body; and a red figure with flames rising from his head and a fan of arms holding ritual implements. A head, and nothing else
Three character turnaround sheets, each showing the same figure from four angles: a four-headed elder in white and gold holding a water pot, a rosary, a spoon and a manuscript; a purple severed head with no body; and a red figure with flames rising from his head and a fan of arms holding ritual implements. An arm for every implement
Three characters, three identities decided separately. None of these looks is a default anybody fell into.

The rules reach further than I expected, too. Two characters are written as having a thousand arms, and one of those entries doesn’t stop at the count: show all thousand in a wide shot, at least fifty in a mid shot, the dominant six to eight in close-up. Somebody had to sit down and decide that.

Which is the part I’d have argued with a month earlier. I thought consistent was a quality you earn by being careful, the way a careful illustrator stays on model. It isn’t. Consistency is a by-product of having decided — a character who looks the same in every panel is just a character somebody made a decision about, once, in words, before any picture existed. All the care lives in the deciding. After that, staying on model is the easy part.

Update log

  • 2026-08-22 — Post #6. Written after going back through the cast: every character with art has a written identity behind it, and 1,080 of those identities pin down an exact number of arms.
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