Gen Con Cosplay Portraiture with Jessica Henson

This week, I’m proud to share the cosplay portraits Distant Era made at Gen Con 2025 with Jessica Henson and her Vi cosplay from Arcane.

Jess and I met in Distant Era’s Gen Con cosplay posing workshop in 2022, where Jess brought a Jester (Critical Role) cosplay that was so good, she won first place in her category in the Gen Con cosplay competition and won second place for best in show.

This summer, Jess showed hints of a new costume she was building for Gen Con 2025. I was excited and intrigued to learn what this would turn out to be. I said so, and then Jess asked about setting up a mini session.

Distant Era portrait of Jessica Henson as Jester from *Critical Role*, 2022.

Raised Stakes

I’m very fond of the participants from my 2022–2023 Distant Era workshops at Gen Con. They took a chance on me when I started running my own workshops—when it was all theory and there was no one to believe in them. So it fills my heart to see participants from those first workshops again, and I’ve gotten to know them over the years.

In last week’s edition of The All Worlds Traveller, we showed cosplayer Indy as Jinx from Arcane (Vi’s sister in the show). Indy happened to be in the same 2022 Distant Era workshop as Jess. As I remarked in that blog, I feel like part of a small, special community that sort of unintentionally and organically formed. And yet, I also feel some elevated stakes making portraits for the participants from those early workshops. Because I’m grateful for them and a fan of what they do, I want to make sure I’m doing the very best I can for them in our Gen Con mini sessions.

The stakes rise even higher when the people I photograph place highly in the Gen Con cosplay competition and win awards for their costumes, as Jess and others have done these past years. We had been very happy with the Jester portraits from 2022, and I felt the 2025 portrait needed to meet or exceed that standard.

Perhaps the final raising of the stakes occurred when I finally found out just what cosplay Jess had been building—when she walked up to our session as a picture-perfect Vi from Arcane, a character and show I adore. These had to be great.

Everything According to Plan

I’m always trying to improve, always trying to move forward and do better work. At the cosplay portrait sessions, I have a general plan, but I want to suit the light and look for the character, so I’m always adapting for the person standing in front of me and the look they brought.

As a fan of the show, I know Vi from Arcane. So I set my light up to take the first shot of Jess as Vi, and straight out of camera it looked great. Here’s a comparison of the first image from our mini session, straight out of camera vs. the edit.

I sometimes spend too much time capturing a great look or moment. However, this time, knowing we had a solid first shot, I moved the session and light along to try something new. I knew the LEDs in Jess’s costume wouldn’t show up if they were lit, so I made sure to keep them in shadow as best I could in every shot we did, moving and flagging the light to achieve this. To emphasize the effect, I moved the light behind her her, giving a dramatic look to the costume, Jess, and Vi. Here’s what that looked like, boosted with hand-drawn haze and glow and some atmospheric graffiti in the background.

As we moved from idea to idea, I changed the light and camera settings to manifest each idea, from short-lighting to rapid flash bursts to freeze action to adding color with gels. Maneuvering quickly from one look to another in our brief session, getting results we were happy with, I felt like I knew what I was doing.

A Wealth of Ideas

As we kept things moving, we got a variety of options from Jess’s twenty-minute session.

One of the reasons I love working with Jess is that she not only arrives with intricately detailed work, but she also arrives with ideas.

For example, in this session, Jess wanted to try a shot where Vi is jumping up and smashing down with her gauntlets. With a quick light adjustment, we achieved this, freezing the jump in midair.

Left: A jump shot Jess wanted to try.
Right: A quick attempt to put that jump shot in the world of Arcane, possibly Piltover.

Later, Jess removed the amazing gauntlets she had created, and we finished our session with a more contemplative Vi, wrapping her bandages. By this time, we had covered a variety of looks and moods for Vi, a true collaboration of ideas and experiments that worked to our satisfaction.

That collaborative spirit is something I truly appreciate about Jess, consistent from the time we photographed Jester in 2022. At the end of that workshop, she politely asked if she could do a picture with a d20, and we took the following photo—one of my favorite images to describe the Distant Era workshops at Gen Con.

I’m grateful to Jess for another wonderful collaboration. So proud to see her place second overall in the professional cosplayer category at Gen Con 2025. Moreover, I am thankful for her kindness and trust.

I’ll sign off this time with another of Jess’s ideas and a favorite among favorites for this session—a true Vi character shot that demonstrates the fully articulated gauntlets Jess crafted for her Vi cosplay. I can’t wait to see what she makes next.

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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.