Character Portraits for Games

I take a lot of portraits and self-portraits. I am fascinated with the way that you can really bring a character to life through portraits and editing.

You can show the internal emotional feelings of a character through their external appearance.

ORIGINAL CHARACTER COSPLAY SELF-PORTRAIT

This character is an original creation of my own. It is designed to play with peoples' expectations of gender, anonymity and fantasy ethnicity. It has elements of femininity, playfulness and child-like fun. It is both mysterious and engaging at the same time. The original portrait image was a little washed out, and the eyes were not sufficiently the focal point. To improve this I increased the shadows and vibrancy of the colours, dialled down the exposure and then lifted the highlights and black point so that the eyes became very dark, and the highlight is intensified.

In a game setting, I believe a character like this could be used as a mysterious NPC who would give the players their quests while retaining an air of mystery and ambiguity of their identity.

Original

Edited

CHARACTER PORTRAIT

This portraits tells a story of a young woman on a sunny, summer's day. She appears as if she is with someone that she cares about because she is looking at the camera in a very caring way. This kind of character could be used in a gentle simulator game.

The original image doesn't have a clear structure. By cropping it I made sure her eyes were in the rule of third focal point and that from foot, through her knees to her face and the tree in top right, is all one strong diagonal axis.

I also made that sure that the colours were vibrant to signify the sunniness of the day.

Edited

LOGAN WALKER COSPLAY SELF-PORTRAITS

These before and after game character portraits show the way in which I am attempting to capture the essence of the character in the game in real life. Editing was needed to clean up the photos and increase the drama and intensity of the emotion of the face.

In terms of game design I think it is important to tell a story through the characterisation as well building engaging game mechanics.

Original

Edited

After editing. Remove background, increase contrast and shadows. This brings the focus onto the eyes. The darkness around the eyes now means that the portrait has an expression of tiredness, or even sadness.

Edited

After editing. Again, increasing the contrast. The intensification of the colour highlights the mask. The brightness of the light source in the eyes increases the emotion of intensity of the gaze.

Edited

In this picture the saturation of the colour is heavily decreased almost to monotone. The effect of this is to make the viewer feel that the character is in a dark situation. Compared to the picture above, this character now looks fierce and angry. Just right for an FPS game!

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