illo

Generate original print-style editorial illustrations for articles and
blogs, starring a recurring mascot that performs each idea. Each character
pack carries one of ten bundled looks (riso, blueprint, woodcut, pixel, clay,
manila, chalk, phosphor, enamel, gouache) or a custom style — default
Blot (a deadpan ink-drop), or design your own with the built-in character
builder. One-metaphor-per-image scenes with named + custom + derived palettes
and reference-image character consistency. Renders through two backends:
your Codex CLI (gpt-image-2 on your Codex subscription — free for
subscribers, no API key) when one is installed and logged in, or
OpenRouter (model-selectable: Grok Imagine, Nano Banana 2/Pro, GPT-5.4
Image 2, …) as the universal fallback.

Hand it "we replatform with zero downtime" and you get the bridge being
rebuilt under live traffic:

🌐 illo-skill.com — live examples, the
character gallery, and copy-paste installs.

The skill itself lives in skills/illo/ — its
README is the full developer reference
(prerequisites, API-key setup, models & cost, everything below in detail).

Same idea, different voice — four of the ten bundled looks:

riso — the house default	clay — stop-motion plasticine
phosphor — CRT trace on glass	blueprint — draftsman linework

Install

Quick install — any agent. One command for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex,
Copilot, Gemini CLI, and the ~70 other runtimes the
skills CLI supports (update later with
npx skills update):

npx skills add tmchow/illo-skill --skill illo

Platform-native installs. The repo also ships a plugin/extension
manifest for each major runtime, so you can install through your platform's
own package manager and get managed updates:

Every lane installs the same skill; releases are tagged v<version> and
the version in every manifest is kept in lockstep with
skills/illo/SKILL.md by CI.

Repo layout

The skill sits in skills/illo/, following the layout of the canonical
skill repos (anthropics/skills, openai/skills): a top-level skills/
folder, one directory per skill. It is deliberately not at the repo root —
installers copy the entire skill directory verbatim, so the skill dir holds
only what every install should ship. Docs-only images live in
_assets/illo/ (linked by raw URL), and repo meta stays at the root —
including the plugin manifests (.claude-plugin/, .codex-plugin/,
.cursor-plugin/, gemini-extension.json) that make the repo installable
as a native plugin on each platform.

Companion repos

• tmchow/illo-characters —
  community character packs ("install the blip character").

Provenance

illo started life inside
tmchow/agent-skills; it moved here
with full git history. The old location keeps a frozen copy so existing
installs don't break, but this repo is the canonical home — new versions
ship only from here.

License

MIT © Trevin Chow — see LICENSE and
skills/illo/NOTICE for attribution of the Blot character and
bundled artwork.