Gala of Everlasting Change Portraits: Gwanwyn Returns!

November 20, 2023
1 min read

In late September, Distant Era returned to the Gala of Everlasting Change one-night live action role-play event in Yorkville, Illinois. Last time, we showed off the portrait of Kara Larsen’s mischievous Aelic. This time, we revisit Lottie á la West’s Gwanwyn for her second year at the gala.

Lottie á la West is one of our most frequently photographed subjects. In the pre-Distant-Era days, we did tons of work together with Crescent Moon Nerdlesque. In recent years, Lottie has been a steadfast friend and client of Distant Era’s LARP portraiture (including the first and second Auxientia steampunk games), and it is always a joy to make her portrait.

A Gallery of Gwanwyns

In 2022 and early 2023, we showed off a gallery of Lottie’s fey character, Gwanwyn. Here’s a gallery of those finished portraits in their various styles. I admire the way Lottie brings variety to her work, always creating something new, always trying something different, as evidenced by these three unique portraits of her character.

Gwanwyn at the Second Gala of Everlasting Change

For the second Gala of Everlasting Change, Lottie and I had only a few minutes to capture a portrait. We’ve been working together long enough that this was no matter. Lottie spun through several quick poses, and we had what we needed in no time. She selected this one as her favorite. I like how different it is from the others, yet it belongs alongside them, variations on a theme. Lottie is a magical creature, equally adept at conveying majesty, humor, curiosity, and wonder.

Thank you, Lottie á la West, for being an amazing subject, colleague, and friend, and thank you once again for hiring Distant Era to make your beautiful portrait!

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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.

  1. Practicing Patience with Personal Projects
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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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