Towns of The Inner Sea is another Pathfinder expansion I worked on early last year.

Towns of the Inner Sea explores six small but richly detailed settlements from the Pathfinder campaign setting. Each entry provides insights into the town’s history, culture, and residents, as well as what dangers lurk in the shadows. Numerous adventure hooks, full-page maps, and stat blocks for key NPCs make these towns fully realized settings, ready for Game Masters to drop into campaigns whenever they’re needed.

The assignment was pretty much all about portraits, which is why I loved it that much.

I never get to spend time on portraits. Runescape characters are quite, umm, low poly, and spending time on skin tones and fine details is most of the times completely pointless.

So for this job I took all my time to look for reference, made experiments on dark skin tones and generally tried and get things right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing about dark skin, as I pointed out some time ago, is that it reflects light in its own particular way and, most importantly, different areas of the face absorb or reflect light differently.

Where skin is thicker, like around the cheek bones or the chin, it tends to be warmer.
Where it’s thinner, as on the bridge of the nose of the forehead, it gets bluer tones, especially outdoors or under a clear sky.

Some areas reflect light completely, giving almost white highlights, while the folds of the skin, and the spots where light occlusion occurs, get almost black.

Most of the characters in Towns of the Inner Sea are supposed to be from a Norther-African-like kind of environment, which means their skin isn’t even too dark, and the difference from dark skin had to be kept even more subtle.

Anyway, to avoid making this post Internet unfriendly I didn’t post all of the characters, so next week I’ll publish the rest.

by Paolo Puggioni