Gen Con Cosplay Portraiture with Indy

The week on The All Worlds Traveller, we return to the Gen Con cosplay portraits from 2025, featuring one of our shining stars from the past three Gen Cons. (Check out some of our previous Gen Con work here.)

Indy is one of my favorite cosplayers to photograph. We first worked together in Distant Era’s Gen Con 2022 workshop and have made cosplay portraits every year since. It’s incredible watching Indy grow, both in confidence and in stature, from year to year, as the Gen Con Game Fair comes and goes.

This year, Indy brought Jinx from Arcane—one of my favorite animated shows in recent years. As we photographed our session, Indy had plenty of ideas of poses for Jinx, and we improvised through each one, with Indy displaying a variety of different moods and emotions for the character.

For Indy’s main portrait, the featured image on this post, I favored a dynamic pose and high contrast edit. We used a pink gel as a rim light and as shadow fill to complement Jinx’s cyan hair. I discovered some Jinx graffiti on Etsy, which I purchased and used to add some character to the background, suggesting the undercity of Zaun from the Arcane series.

Once Jinx’s main portrait was finished, I edited several others from our session. Whereas I had chosen a complementary, high contrast editing style for the main Jinx portrait, I went with an analogous color scheme for some of the other portraits—teal gradations from hair to background. To me, this suggested Jinx’s calmer, somber, more subdued and thoughtful side. In editing Jinx’s portraits, whenever possible, I selected or enhanced colors to highlight the emotion Indy displayed in the portrait.

Leveling Up

I said it last year and the year before, and I’ll say it again: I’m so impressed with the way Indy has embraced character in all the portraits we’ve done, improving year after year. Where once Indy approached the photo set timidly, now Indy walks up, plays, and has fun throughout the session. That’s our objective, after all. Elizabeth and I are so proud to see this gradual transformation over the years.

Indy cosplays at Gen Con: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

An Unexpected Community

On a personal note, it’s people like Indy and her mother Kate that keep us coming back to Gen Con to do cosplay portraiture sessions. After four years doing Distant Era cosplay portraiture at Gen Con, we feel like part of a community that formed unexpectedly around the cosplay workshops and sessions we kicked off in 2022. I’ve experienced several seasons of Gen Con—from my first experiences in Milwaukee when I attended as a TSR enthusiast to the first years in Indianapolis as a D&D Miniatures players and community blogger for Wizards of the Coast to my years writing for Dungeons & Dragons and other games to the years teaching board games and photography workshops and finally Distant Era sessions.

These days, Gen Con is busier than ever, but I love the people I’m spending it with and this lovely community we’ve met, and which continues to grow year after year.

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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.