Star Wars Rococo with Gaby and James Martineau

December 25, 2023
2 mins read

For C2E2 (the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo) 2023, Gaby and James Martineau hired designer Erin Gallagher to create some uniquely glamorous Star-Wars-Rococo-themed costumes. Shortly after the event, Gaby and James hired Distant Era to make their portraits, wearing those costumes. In previous weeks, we featured James Martineau and Gaby Martineau solo. Our final, Christmas day post features their EPIC COUPLES PORTRAIT!

Merry Christmas!

When Gaby and James commissioned these artworks, they knew they wanted to send out their couples portrait as their Christmas card for 2023. Well, they have now done this. It is my honor to present the card they sent in the week preceding Christmas:

The insanely awesome Martineau Christmas card

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how well executed the theme was and how well the music elevated the mood. Gaby is a professional event planner and an expert in such matters, but still, the card blew my mind, and I hope it blows your mind as well. Merry Christmas from the Martineaus!

Photography, Editing, and Composition

We wanted all three of these portraits to look like gallery pieces, and so we lit them in a traditional portrait style, with a big, soft light to the left of the camera and a light with a red gel to the right, controlled to show the radiance from the saber, as well as a white panel to bounce the light. Thus you’ll see the red light stays mostly on the right side of the image, touching the subjects’ skin and clothing at the angle of the saber. In the final portrait, some of the light bled onto the background on the left side of the image, and I really liked the gradient it created, red to blue.

I’ve spoken about the editing of the other two portraits individually, and there’s not much to add here, so I’ll instead show off a BONUS couples portrait I gave to Gaby and James in two versions, which I’ll unite with a slider because I know James loves playing with the sliders on this blog.

The Final Version

Gaby and James and I had great fun making these Star Wars Rococo portraits featuring the costumes Erin Gallagher designed. Any day I get a commission from my close friends to photograph creative science-fiction and fantasy is a day living the dream.

And a Happy New Year

Gaby and James commissioned this portrait session in June 2023, the week prior to the shoot date for the next personal Distant Era series, which will be my greatest challenge yet. So it seemed convenient simply to ask them if they’d like to be in it. This gave me a chance to trial run the multi-subject shoot the following weekend, ironing out any rough edges. Look for that extension of this session in 2024, along with the most ambitious Distant Era project yet.

Gaby sent a photo of these portraits as they were meant to be experienced: in print! As usual, the physical artworks look even better than the digital pictures. I can’t wait to see them framed!

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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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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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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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