How to Create Your Own Anime Pictures at Anime Central 2026

Anime Central 2026, known to regulars as ACen, runs May 15-17 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, just outside Chicago. It is the largest anime convention in the Midwest and one of the ten largest in North America, pulling together three days of panels, an exhibit hall packed with vendors and collectibles, video game rooms, anime premieres, and concerts. Voice actor guests for 2026 include Caitlin Glass, Clifford Chapin, and Ricco Fajardo, which means the autograph and Q&A floors will have some serious draw.

ACen has a specific character: it is community-forward, deeply organized, and has a cosplay culture that reflects the Midwest convention scene, which tends to be both ambitious and unpretentious about it. If you photograph it well, you have material that is worth doing something with.

👉 Create Your ACen Anime Art on AutoWeeb

Step 1: Photograph the Convention with Intention

The Stephens Convention Center has a distinct interior, and ACen's layout gives you multiple environments to shoot in: the main exhibit hall, the outdoor areas between buildings, the lobby spaces that fill up with cosplayers between events. The outdoor shots in mid-May Illinois light, before the summer heat hits, are clean and soft, which translates well in anime conversion.

Costume variety at ACen tends to span the full spectrum of fandom, from classic 90s and 2000s series that the Midwest convention circuit has always loved to current seasonal titles. This variety is useful when you are planning which art style to convert into. A shojo costume from a long-running romance series warrants a different AI style selection than a mechanized suit from a recent mecha title.

Group photos are also worth taking at ACen. The convention draws friend groups and cosplay squads who plan coordinated looks, and a group shot of four or five coordinated characters gives you something you cannot easily recreate elsewhere.

Step 2: Convert Your Cosplay Photos to Anime Art

Upload your photos to AutoWeeb's photo-to-anime converter and select the art style. The ACen crowd gives you a wide spread of source aesthetics to match.

Some useful starting prompts for ACen photos:

• late 2000s anime aesthetic, cel shaded, warm convention hall lighting, detailed costume embroidery
• modern shonen style, dynamic pose, sharp line art, indoor convention center background blurred
• group shot, four characters, matching color palette, soft spring light from convention windows

For outdoor shots taken between the convention buildings, try adding environmental context to the prompt: mid-May light, overcast sky, soft shadows, modern building architecture in background. The AI uses those cues to calibrate how light falls on the converted subject.

Step 3: Design Your Original Anime Character

ACen's celebrity guests are worth factoring into your character creation session. If you attended a panel with Caitlin Glass or Ricco Fajardo, you came away with some mental reference for how specific vocal performance shapes a character's identity. Use that when you are deciding what archetype your own character embodies.

Upload a selfie from the convention to AutoWeeb's Character Creator. The AI generates a full Character Sheet from your photo: multiple angles, expression variations, consistent design across every future generation. Describe your character's archetype in the prompt with specificity. "Quiet strategist with amber eyes and a sharp undercut" lands differently than "serious character." The more specific the design intent, the more distinctive the output.

Step 4: Build Scenes That Capture the ACen Atmosphere

ACen's setting, just outside one of North America's great cities, gives you a specific urban-adjacent energy to work with in your scene building. The AutoWeeb Japan City Life pack maps well onto the convention's Chicago-suburban backdrop, with city skyline shots and street-level perspectives that capture the same mix of industry and community.

For scenes that feel specifically like ACen, prompt your character inside a large convention hall, gathered with other characters in a lobby atrium, or standing outside a glass-and-steel building under a pale May sky. Slice-of-life conventions are a well-established anime setting, and the AI handles them with confidence when the prompt is grounded.

If you went with a group in coordinated costumes, generate a full group scene with all four or five characters together in a single image. AutoWeeb's Character Sheets keep each character visually consistent, so a multi-character scene actually looks like it was designed together.

👉 Turn Your ACen Photos into Anime on AutoWeeb

The Midwest convention circuit has a specific energy that is worth documenting properly. For more on the conversion process, the photo-to-anime guide covers every step, and the character creation guide goes deeper on building a character that stays consistent across every scene you generate.