Have you ever sat around the role-playing table wishing you had a picture of your favourite characters, and been impressed as some of your more artistically talented friends sketch a portrait in a mere moments, much to your dismay as your character remained solely within your imagination. Well fear not, now there’s an easy and affordable solution to the problem. Introducing Roleplaying Character Portraits by Susie Balducci.

Now in the past, traditionally the less artistic among us have sought refuge in other more limited solutions, using generic images we find around, or using some basic software to create a character based around a few generic archetypes often with limited success and requiring hours to figure out how to operate the software. Well for the same price and far less time, you can now own a personalised portrait of your favourite characters, with unique features and touches by someone with genuine artistic talent.

Susie was kind enough to take me through to process of creating a character portrait for the first time. To start with once you’ve made contact with Susie via her website, http://www.freewebs.com/rpg-portraits you’ll be sent a character description form to fill in. A good example of which can be seen at her website from the link above.

The beauty of this is, it’s completely open ended so it’s wise to spend a few moments deciding exactly what you want. In my case after filling in the rough details I asked if the face of our character could resemble someone in real life, which was no problem at all, and all Susie needed was a few photo’s to base her drawings from. Once you’ve sent everything off and discussed the design with Susie it’s a simple case of waiting a short while for the initial sketch to come back.

After only a day Susie came back to me with the initial sketch, which I must say really blew me away in terms of quality. In this instance I’d asked for an Angelic character, wielding a sword, with a look much like in the film Constantine, along with a small frog, and a teabag (I know don’t ask). But here’s the sketch that came back to us.

Full Size Version

To say she captured the face of our friend Martin, was an understatement, that really was a brilliant likeness. If you’re in any doubt here’s a link to the original picture Susie used: Martins Picture

From this point I had to opportunity to suggest any changes, but I was so impressed by the drawing I just gave the go ahead, and Susie went ahead and inked up the final version of the drawing.

To my surprise there was an e-mail sitting in my inbox less than a day later with the final version attached. Just to explain both the sketch and the final versions arrived as extremely high resolution images, so you can see every detail perfectly. Quite frankly I was astounded by the results; this was a profession drawing to be sure. The sort of pictures you can expect artists to produce for Roleplaying books, far superior to anything even my most talented friends could produce. The attention to detail was fantastic, and there was some brilliant little touches added above those in the original sketch. The clouds on the tie, the ring around Martin head, and not to mention the details in the wings, the feathers looked very lifelike. Here’s the final version:

Full Size Version

Now all that remained was the physical drawing to arrive on my doorstep, and I was equally surprised here too, in only one day, the drawing was in my hands, all the way from Scotland down to London and in good condition as well. The whole process was complete in less than five days.

I can heartily recommend anyone that’s looking for a portrait of their favourite role-playing character to contact Susie, for the kind of personal service that’s a rarity to find these days. I was impressed beyond words to the quality of her artwork, and after showing the finished results to all the members of the Hobbits Hole, they too were equally impressed. All I can say is that I’m sure myself and some of my other gaming friends will look Susie up in the future for some more of her fine work.