Gen Con Cosplay Portraiture with Natty the Dice Fairy

This week, we return to the mini portrait sessions from Gen Con 2025, this time featuring cosplayer and crocheter Sarah Lemons in her Natty the Dice Fairy cosplay.

Natty the Dice Fairy

A fantastical creature who spreads joy and blesses dice prior to games, Natty the Dice Fairy is the creation of cosplayer and craftsperson Sarah Lemons, who invented Natty the Dice Fairy the winter before Gen Con 2025 in order to spread joy in a world that seems to grow bleaker by the day. Color was a major inspiration for Natty’s costume as well, the rainbow symbolic of the LGBTQ+ community.

I wanted to combine my work in crochet with an elf-like fairy creature and Natty the Dice Fairy was born.

Sarah Lemons on creating Natty the Dice Fairy

Photography and Editing

I’ve taken a “painterly” approach to light for Gen Con 2025, leaning with a little more confidence into the style of portraits I like to make.

After we’d done some portraits in my favorite painterly lighting, we brightened things up for variety, and we photographed a sequence of images showing Natty with her dice and parasol.

When it came time to edit the portraits in the weeks following Gen Con, I was still in an experimental mode and wanted to play around with a few options to see how we could enhance Sarah’s costume with our edits.

For one of Sarah’s portraits, I riffed on the border techniques I learned from Chris Koeppen (demonstrated in last week’s post featuring the Gen Con cosplays for Laura Kiernan and Deana Vazquez). Noting the leaf patterns in Sarah’s costume, I discovered a leaf-and-flower border, courtesy of Gordon Johnson on Pixabay. I created my own rainbow gradient, which I attached to the border, to go with the spectrum of colors in Natty’s costume.

Dice Fairyland

Getting a little ambitious and in need of practice, I wondered whether I could drop a painted background behind her. For this I used part of Norwegian Landscape with a Rainbow by Johan Christian Dahl (1821) and tweaked it this way and that. To bring out the theme a little more, I photographed some dice and dropped them in.

My HonorRollsDice Dreams of Atlantis set.

As I photographed the dice I use for the Agon RPG, I thought about making a dice fairyland. I merged one with the mountain in the background of the painting and placed another in the landscape. Once the dice had a presence in the picture, I moved on, adding in the border I’d created for Sarah’s other portrait. In the end, I was happy with the Dice Fairyland and its rainbow, having had the opportunity to practice some techniques in preparation for a (Greek-themed!) Gen Con composite I have coming up.

Blessings of the Dice Fairy

It was a pure delight photographing Natty the Dice Fairy at Gen Con 2025 and meeting her creator, Sarah.

Most of Distant Era’s mini portrait sessions at Gen Con are booked by cosplayers I’ve met through the Gen Con workshops we’ve held in the past. Sarah, however, we met through a post in the Fans of Gen Con group. I’m grateful to her for taking a chance on a Distant Era session and thankful to meet a new friend. I hope these portraits bring some light and joy into her life the way she brings joy to others.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.