Paper Collage Image

Turns a photo or a written scene into a handcrafted 3D layered-paper collage — torn edges, visible paper grain, soft cast shadows — while keeping the subject recognizable. Use when you want a warm, tactile craft look instead of another digital-painting filter.

Most style filters make a photo unrecognizable. This one is built around not doing that.

A photographic portrait beside the same portrait rebuilt as layered torn paper, the woman still recognizable
Source photo and the skill’s output. The copper-red bob, the side part, the freckles, the blue-grey eyes and the slate V-neck all survive the change of medium — only the material is different.

The skill turns a photo, or a written scene, into a handcrafted 3D layered-paper collage: torn and deckled edges, visible paper grain, cast shadows between layers, a restrained scatter of paper flowers and stars. What makes it worth cataloguing is not the look — plenty of prompts get you paper texture — but the preservation checklist it carries: pose, gaze, expression, hairstyle, clothing silhouette, subject count and composition are all named as things the model must not touch. It changes the medium and leaves the person alone.

What it is

A single SKILL.md — no scripts, no reference library, no data. Its value is entirely in how it writes the prompt: an eight-field skeleton (use case, primary request, subject, composition, style/medium, scene/backdrop, lighting/mood, constraints), a preservation list for edits, and an unusually specific exclusion list. That last one is the part that actually holds the style together: it names glossy plastic, clay, fabric, wood and metal as textures to avoid, because those are exactly what a model drifts toward when you ask for “handmade”. It also bans all text, letters, numbers and watermarks outright.

Written as a Codex skill — it installs to the Codex skills directory and calls the built-in image tool. Nothing in the method is tied to that, though: the skeleton and both lists transfer to any image model you like.

What we found running it

It will replace your background with white paper, and that surprises people. The skill says to use a clean white paper backdrop unless you ask for something else. Applied to an edit, that means the park your dog was standing in simply goes away:

A beagle photographed on a park path beside the paper-collage version, where the background has become plain white paper
The park path and grass are gone, replaced by the white paper backdrop the skill defaults to. The breed markings, the long ears, the tongue and the black collar all carry over intact.

This is the skill working as designed, not failing — but if you want the setting kept, say so in the brief. It is the one instruction most worth overriding.

The style holds; the likeness wobbles. Across our runs the craft layer never broke once — paper grain, torn edges, visible stacking, soft shadows, and not a single stray letter or watermark anywhere. The preservation layer is softer. Re-running the same brief moved a beagle’s ears shorter and widened its face until the breed read as a cocker spaniel; another run turned a blurred lakeshore into defined mountain peaks and pulled the mouth into a firmer expression. For anything where the point is that it looks like that particular dog or person, generate a few and pick.

Aspect ratio is not yours to choose. Edits roughly inherit the source photo’s shape, but a text-only generation came back square no matter what the prompt asked for. Budget a crop.

A ginger cat on a windowsill watching rain, generated from text alone as a layered paper diorama
Generated from a one-line brief with no source image — the skill builds a full paper diorama, window frame and rain included. It also came back square when the prompt asked for 3:2.
  • It reads as a physical object, not a filter — given a landscape it will build a shadow-box diorama, frame and all, rather than a flat illustration. That is the layering instruction doing its job.
  • Decoration stays where it belongs — the paper flowers, hearts and stars land in the corners and never crowd a face. The “keep them secondary” instruction is one of the few soft rules the model consistently respects.
  • Brand-new repository — published August 2026, no stars, no community track record yet. We are cataloguing it on the strength of what it produced for us, not on adoption.
The Eiffel Tower at dusk rebuilt as a framed paper diorama with torn-paper sky bands
A dusk photograph of the Eiffel Tower rebuilt as a framed paper diorama — sky in torn bands, lattice cut as narrow slits, the river in layered ribbons.

Related

For finding a prompt structure to start from rather than a style to apply, see AI Image Prompts.

Installing

Not ours — install from the source repository. Copy the skill folder into your Codex skills directory. Note that the repository carries no licence file, so treat it as all rights reserved: read it, run it, but do not redistribute it. It costs nothing itself; whatever your image provider charges is the whole bill.

Paper Collage Image — Storyverse Film School