Grown in Ideogram · a case study

How Pea got its face.

Pea's the personal executive assistant I've been building. It needed a face that would look the same everywhere it went, and we found it in Ideogram. This is how that went.

Stu Jordan, Chief Pea Grower October 2026 Ideogram 4.5
An early Pea with dark eyebrowsOut
Eyebrows
An early Pea with one front toothOut
One tooth
An early Pea with a full row of teethOut
Teeth
The locked Pea: velvet bumps, a wide open grin with a pink tongue, no teethPea
5 October

A few faces that didn't make it, and the one that did.

Early October

Pea kept changing.

No two of the early pictures of Pea looked quite the same. One had eyebrows and the next one didn't, and the sprout changed every time.

I wanted Pea cute but never babyish, because it's an executive assistant after all, and more than anything I needed it to be the same Pea in every picture. So on the night of 3 October we moved Pea into Ideogram.

3 to 4 October

The back came first.

Funnily enough, the first thing Ideogram got right was the back, a round velvet pea with one curly sprout and a cute little bum. I loved it, and it went straight onto my X profile before Pea even had a front.

Pea from behind, in soft pink and cream light, with the sprout and the little bum crease
4 to 5 October

Then the face.

The face took a fair few rounds. The eyebrows went, and so did the teeth. The belly button came from one picture where I spotted a little sideways dimple and liked it, and every Pea since has had one.

Just after half past midnight on 5 October a batch of four came back, and the last one was Pea.

The batch of four, picture one1
The batch of four, picture two2
The batch of four, picture three3
The batch of four, picture four, the one we kept4Pick

“This one nailed it.”5 October

5 October

Eight things that don't change.

Then I wrote down what can't change. There are eight things, pinned to that one picture, and the picture goes into every prompt. The pose, the prop, the room and the light can be anything.

Pea, the locked master picture: a round velvet green pea waving, with a curly sprout and a wide open grin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
  1. 1
    One sprout. Curl to the right, leaf low on the other side. Only ever one.
  2. 2
    Velvet bumps. No eyebrows.
  3. 3
    Googly eyes. A catchlight in each.
  4. 4
    Raised cheeks, plain green. No blush.
  5. 5
    The grin. Set low, tongue out, no teeth.
  6. 6
    A sideways belly button. An innie, with a little crescent.
  7. 7
    Matte velvet. One piece, no seams.
  8. 8
    Short and stubby. Mitten hands, round feet, and a little bum crease at the back.
5 to 21 October

After that, it got quick.

With the face locked, the pictures came fast. Poses, props, a little level system, scenes and a whole run of Facebook gags, and every one of them is the same Pea. That's about seven hundred pictures in three weeks.

Pea as a nightclub bouncer with a clipboard Pea diving to catch a sticky note Pea guarding a door with a do not disturb sign Pea winking over a chessboard Pea lifting a barbell Pea in a shop window with a coming soon tag Pea in a pea-green racing car Pea as a lifeguard above a pool of paperwork Pea conducting an orchestra of office things Pea in a fire helmet putting out little fires on a desk Pea holding a big golden key with a pod handle Pea in a guard's cap in front of a bank vault Pea in a space helmet beside a pea-pod rocket Pea surfing a wave of paperwork on a pod board Pea in glasses reading a long scroll Pea gasping at a laptop
10 October

A small change to the sprout.

A few days in, I noticed that Pea's sprout, seen from behind, looked a lot like the p in our logo. So we turned the curl the other way and dropped the leaf low, and asked Ideogram for exactly that and nothing else. Eight came back with the new sprout, and the rest of Pea was untouched.

Sprout candidate one, an open spiral with the leaf low on the left1Pick
Sprout candidate two2
Sprout candidate three, a tight loop3
Sprout candidate four, with the leaf high on the stem4Leaf too high
Sprout candidate five5
Sprout candidate six6
Sprout candidate seven, a looser spiral7
Sprout candidate eight, a tight loop near the stem8

“The leaf needs to be much lower.”On number four

“We don't want to make it obviously a p, just so it can be one.”

20 October

No blush.

The last change was the cheeks. Ideogram kept giving Pea a soft blush and I didn't want one, so we added a line asking for no blush at all and cleaned up the cheeks on the reference picture. The next forty came back clean.

Pea's face with a warm glow on each cheek
Before
Pea's face with plain green cheeks
After
Now

Where Pea is now.

Pea's on the website and in the film, in the Facebook feed and behind me on Zoom. It's the same Pea everywhere, which was the whole point.

The meetpea.com home page
The website
A frame from the meetpea.com film: Pea waving and saying hi
The film
A frame from a short Pea clip: Pea diving for a sticky note
The feed
Pea from behind
X
A television studio set with a lit pea sign and a Pea statue
Zoom
The shirt back print: Pea from behind
The shirt print

What it means for branding is quite mind blowing. Keeping a character on model used to take an illustrator and a style guide, and for Pea it took one picture and a list of eight things.

The prompt

Every Pea picture started from this.

The green bits are where your own character goes.

Use @img_1 as the exact character: the things about it that never change, in plain words. Keep it exactly on-model. IMPORTANT: what it must never have, for example no blush at all, no teeth.

One line of style. Premium 3D animated film still, soft studio light, clean and uncluttered.

The scene, with the props in your character's world.
@img_1 is the one picture you locked
Ideogram 4.5Magic Prompt offQuality HighFour at a time, twiceOne referenceOne prompt at a time
Pea's version, filled in 
Use @img_1 as the exact character: the same cute pea character with soft green velvet flocked fur, a round egg-shaped body, big round glossy eyes, two soft raised velvet bumps where eyebrows would be (no eyebrows), a wide open grin set low with a pink tongue and no teeth, a small sideways oval dimple belly button, short stubby velvet arms and legs, and one curly sprout on top whose curl turns to the viewer's right with one small leaf low on the opposite side of the stem. Keep it exactly on-model. IMPORTANT: no blush at all. No rosy, pink, peach or orange cheeks; the cheeks are exactly the same even velvet green as the rest of the body.

Premium 3D animated feature film still, soft warm studio lighting, shallow depth of field, clean and uncluttered, no mess, cute and funny.

The pea dives horizontally through the air like a football goalkeeper making a spectacular save, arms fully stretched, catching a small yellow sticky note an instant before it slips into a narrow gap between wooden floorboards beside a desk leg. Determined, delighted face, a little motion blur, camera at floor level.

Square 2000 × 2000 · 16:9 2720 × 1536 · 4:5 1792 × 2240 · 9:16 1440 × 2560, sides in multiples of 32 · for a tall card, add: keep Pea between 30% and 80% of the height, the top 30% plain background

How we ran it

My agent did the typing in Ideogram, queued the runs and fetched the results, and I looked at the sheets and picked. About one pick in four went back for breaking a rule, usually teeth sneaking into a grin or the curl flipping round. The cut-outs came from a small script that keys out the plain backdrop and keeps the shadow, and Ideogram's Remove Background does the same job for a credit.