Escaping the Dark with Steve and Liz

May 17, 2021
2 mins read

This is a weird one: this week, I’m posting rough portraits into which little effort was made (these are “push the button and we’re done” portraits), alongside what was done with those portraits.

We’re also opening up the Game & Hobby section of this blog for occasional posts on those topics. Distant Era itself will remain strictly photography, but the All Worlds Traveller will meander into other topics from time to time. 

The Context

In 2020, I had my “black-and-white birthday,” in which all the things I was given were black-and-white. One was the new Wardruna album, Kvitravn and tickets to their concert (both of which were long delayed with the pandemic), and the other was Escape the Dark Castle, a game featuring black-and-white card art reminiscent of the oldschool Dungeons & Dragons adventures from the 1970s and 1980s that I grew up with. 

This cooperative game takes about thirty minutes to play and requires no prior rules explanation. All it really requires is good dice luck and the fortitude to endure your character being slaughtered by horrible monsters and traps over and over again (unless the aforementioned luck sees you through). It has its own atmospheric soundtrack, is small and portable, can be played solo, and it’s a blast. 

We loved this game so much that when the science-fiction followup, Escape the Dark Sector, was released in the fall, I snatched it up, as well its awesome ‘80s synth soundtrack. 

The Portraits

Themeborne, the company that produces these “Escape the Dark” games, launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund expansions for Escape the Dark Sector, introducing android, alien, and psychic characters, and a wealth of other cool stuff. One of the add-ons you could select was a commissioned portrait of yourself as a prisoner of the Dark Sector or the Dark Castle, drawn by the game’s artist and composer, Alex Crispin. The portraits would be delivered as both digital files and printed, playable characters in the game. Such was our enjoyment of the game and its aesthetic that we decided we had to have them. 

Themeborne sent us guidelines for the photos. For example, the Dark Castle characters face right and the Dark Sector characters face left. I used one hard light and a V-Flat background in order to turn over portraits that emphasized the hard shadows I hoped would be best as guides for illustration. Themeborne’s guidelines also reminded us that we’re prisoners in these pictures, so no smiling. This is why my own portraits have weary expressions. 

Escaping the Dark for Real

This week is officially our Escape from the Dark Year. Today marks two weeks since my second shot of the vaccine, and Liz will be in the clear by the week’s end. Last week, I posted a photo of the 2017 eclipse and reflected on an eclipsed year. In what is perhaps an even closer metaphor, this week I’m thinking of escaping a year of confinement and gathering with others (hopefully to play the Escape the Dark games with ourselves as characters).

Check out how Themeborne transformed us into playable characters in the games!

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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.

The All Worlds Traveller

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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About a Distant Era

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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