I drew this portrait for a character in an RP happening on a forum. I used to do
a lot of RP on forums, where in contrast to a tabletop RPG like D&D, everyone
describes what their character(s) are doing with at least a paragraph or two.
Since it’s quite a lot slower, it lets you take time to flesh out the characters,
their actions, and their interactions with other characters, while combat takes
the backburner (if it’s there at all).
Anyway, with the death of a lot of forums, I tried to find an active one and try
joining an RP. My character is Winston, a 33-year-old Latin teacher at a posh
school for nobility with a penchant for telling tall tales and eating sweets.
For his design I looked at a young Stephen Fry (I was watching a lot of Fry and
Laurie at the time), who has that kind of posh look without seeming
unapproachable, as well as Remus Lupin’s from the Harry Potter movies, whose
design centered around making him a quintessentially English wizard. Winston
isn’t English, but it seemed like the right direction to take.
I initially created a couple sketches, one that looked like someone’s 45-year-old
dad, and one that looked about the right age but way too smug to be the affable
teacher sort of guy. Both of them were relatively plain, not incredibly
handsome but not bad looking either.
Then I looked again at the character portraits submitted by the other RPers, and
seeing post after post of flawless anime-esque characters, I realized I had to
make a change. I didn’t want to make Winston very flashy, since he’s not a
wealthy man himself, so I modeled his face off of the handsome Kristoph Gavin
from Ace Attorney, and gave him Stephen Fry energy, as one might put it.
On a whim, I decided that he would have a broken left arm due to a skiing injury
before the term started.
