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.
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.
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.
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