You as a fired-clay figure of the Terracotta Army
Around 220 BC a workshop in north-central China built thousands of life-size figures from moulded clay parts, fired them grey and buried them. Erafy builds a new figure from your photo the same way, standing on its own clay slab.
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Nobody in the examples is a real person — the before photos are invented faces. These are our best results, not average ones. Sometimes AI can't handle it and modifies your face. All we can offer is a try.
How the Terracotta Army was made
Roughly 8,000 life-size figures were buried in pits beside an emperor's tomb near Xi'an between about 246 and 208 BC. They were mass-produced by assembly: coarse loess clay pressed into a small set of moulds, legs, torso, arms, hands and head separately, joined with slip, finished by hand while leather-hard, and fired. Fired without air, the clay comes out the flat grey of a roof tile.
Every head is pressed from a handful of face moulds: square, long, round, broad at the cheekbones, narrowing to the chin. The hand then adds a short list: brows as raised ridges, eyes as narrow slits under a heavy lid, a moustache or beard laid on in clay, hair grooved and knotted. Faces from this bench look like each other and like no photograph; of a person the clay can keep at most the nearest mould, the brows, the hair and any beard.
Erafy makes a new picture, not a filtered copy, as with all its crafts: a figure seen whole on its own slab before pale earth, turned a quarter away, pieced together. With Situation on the figure might be a groom kneeling beside a horse or a cloth seller beside her silks. A pet is built the same way, on its own slab, with its own animal head.
More pictures
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Beside bolts of cloth -
A couple -
A bearded dragon as a person
Other crafts: Stone and clay
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Cave paintingaround 15,000 BC -
Levantine rock artaround 6000 BC -
Egyptian tomb paintingaround 2400 BC -
Minoan frescoaround 1600 BC -
Assyrian palace reliefaround 700 BC -
Greek vase paintingaround 450 BC
Questions
Is every face in the Terracotta Army different?
Roughly right for the surface and wrong about the method. The heads were pressed from a limited number of moulds and then finished by hand, so hair knots and plaits, moustaches, ears and noses differ from figure to figure while the faces beneath come from the same few types. The variety is combinatorial, assembled from a catalogue of parts, and Erafy's version works the same way.
Were the Terracotta Army figures painted?
Yes, brightly, in lacquer-based pigment: red, green, pink, purple and black. Most of it flaked off within minutes of exposure to the air after excavation, which is why the figures are remembered as grey. Erafy shows them as excavated, bare clay under a film of loess dust, with a few flakes of colour left in sheltered hollows.
What would I look like as a Terracotta Army figure?
Erafy makes a new picture from your photo in the style of the year you pick, so how much it resembles you varies from one go to the next. It varies most in the black-and-white years and in the crafts before 1900, where faces are drawn in the craft's style. We make no promise about how any result will look.
