Anime Portraiture 1: My Hero Academia

September 27, 2021
2 mins read

In May 2021, one of my lifelong friends reached out to say she was taking a cross-country trip with her daughters and wondered if they might commission some portraits on their way through Chicago. 

The girls were anime enthusiasts and wanted to play characters from their favorite shows. The elder daughter had designed her own character from the My Hero Academia universe, and the younger wanted to be Homura Akemi from Madoka Magica.

In the League of Villains

I don’t know too much anime yet outside Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and Space Dandy (I love all three of those), with a side of Dorohedoro, Attack on Titan, and Psychopass. The girls’ mother sent over the basics, and then I started researching and assembling a crew together to shoot the portraits. That crew included Distant Era client and collaborator Erin Gallagher on makeup and MVP Elizabeth MacDougald on everything else. 

The elder daughter’s portrait was first. The character she had created was called Liz, and she walked the misty border between hero and villain. Liz had been sent on a mission to infiltrate the heroes of My Hero Academia, though she secretly worked with the villains who hung out at the League of Villains’ hideout, a shady bar with an exposed brick interior. According to design, her character was a tough fighter who used blades and bore a scar on her cheek; her hair would be slightly mussed from fighting. In addition, she possessed mind control powers, and her eyes turned red when she manifested those powers.

We did not have the liberty of shooting on location, so I found a backdrop that would fit the League of Villains’ hideout. The first Liz portrait depicts her in the hideout. We introduced a good deal of haze into the image to evoke the feeling of a smoky bar, though I pulled that back in editing. It made sense that there would be light bleed from other sources, neon lights, a jukebox, atmospheric lights, etc., so we gelled a light behind Liz in order to give a cool cast to the right side of the image, which would give some definition to her dark hair and jacket. Finally, the blue light would complement the red brick on the left side of the frame, with Liz as the composition’s neutral-colored center.

For Liz’s second portrait, we played with a number of fight and power poses. Keeping in mind the psychic powers that turned her eyes red, I put a red gel on a light directly behind Liz and shot some images where she posed as if using her powers. 

Powers of Mind Control!

In Photoshop

The first thing to fix in Liz’s image was her scar, which read theatrically but not on film. Using the frequency separation technique, I retouched the skin texture around the scar to blend the scar into the surrounding skin. I enhanced various aspects of the images, removed the light stand from the mind control image, colored the eyes, and added some beautiful “mind control” powers. Near the end of the process, I reshaped a shadowy corner of a lip to even it out. These always take some time, but so far I was working within my range. Next week, we’ll look at the challenging composites featured in the Homura Akemi images.

League of Villains photo edit
Mind Control photo edit

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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.

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Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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