Working from the idea that a revolutionary today to best connect with my target market of ages 16-30 and 30+ would be a social influencer or micro influencer and inspired by Roman Dlapa’s suggestion that female characters are usually avatars of an adventure, where justice and adventure are the strongest motivational points you may find in fictional characters, I’m going to make my first games master a female and I’m going to take inspiration for her look and dress from modern twenty-something year old social influencers and couple this style with that of historical revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and the typical combat look that is often associated with leaders of a revolution. I started by doing some research on Google on social influencers and I found a few female looks that felt in keeping with what I have in mind:

Admittedly these images look like they’ve been taken from a fashion shoot but I guess that’s going to be the case when you’re dealing with young female social influencers. One thing I immediately noticed is that the majority of these females have dyed red hair. I didn’t look for females with red hair specifically but my search evolved to single out a look I now know to be Street Style Punk and it appears dyed hair is synonymous with this style. I arrived at Street Style Punk because of the tie in this style has with combat clothing and you can see this in the first image with the khaki combat style jacket and the combat style leather boots which we associate with revolutionaries though these have a more modern and more hip / young twist. I like the round dark sunglasses worn by the female in the second image, I think these would add a certain anonymity to the character and I would expect this from an underground revolutionary who might want to move around unnoticed. The third and fourth images are a little too cool and mainstream for my liking. The majority of my SOM are intelligent geeky types and I think a character who’s a bit more left field will be more relatable to them. In summary I think I most favour the looks of the subjects in the first and second images so I will construct my character using one of these images as a basis and then build her up utilising some photo bashing techniques.

The raw image

I started by cutting out a female from one of the above images. The look of the female in the first image is more inline with what I was after but I opted for using the female in the second image as the quality is better and she’s faced to the front which is easier to work with.

Adding a beret

Taking influence from Che Guevara who was often pictured wearing a beret, I sought a similar style of head piece for my female character. I cut this out, placed it on the figure’s head and then made some adjustments to the levels as well as adding some custom shadows to make it sit better tonally within the image. I then took the Escape movement logo and placed this onto the front of the beret.

Adding a trench coat

I added a long khaki trench coat to achieve the combat style that was missing from the raw image and I rounded off the look by adding a red arm band inspired by those worn in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Applying filters

Finally I applied a subtle artistic dry brush filter and utilised some other techniques learned from the photo bashing task to make the image look less photo real and more painted.

Tying this to my project

As a starting point I’m pretty pleased with this as my first games master character. Everything about the character from the look of the female to her apparel and detailing is very near to how I pictured she should look. There is room for improvement of course - The logos on the beret and the arm band both need more art working, currently they look a bit flat and they could use some texturing to make them look like embroidery and lift them out a bit. Also the trench coat needs some more shadow as it’s currently sitting a bit flat on the subject in places. Aside from this I’m quite pleased and being I’ve some quite heavy stylising planned to bring the visual treatment of the subject into the app which will definitely mask the imperfections, I’m happy to use this character to drive the narrative throughout the first version of the escape gameplay element.