Portrait Workshop is a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices that makes it easy to create beautiful customized character portraits. You can bring your own character to life in less than a minute – no art skills required!
Portrait Workshop is not a library of pre-drawn portraits. Instead, it creates unique portraits from professionally hand-illustrated weapons, armor, gear, clothing, and facial features. You can make a million portraits without seeing the same one twice.
The simple interface is fun and easy to use. Select your character’s traits (age, gender, race, class, and beauty), and then multiple portraits appear. Pick one you like as a starting point, and fine-tune it until it matches your vision of your character.
You can make a beautiful portrait on a phone or tablet, then export the image for a range of uses. If you back this Kickstarter at the Publisher level, you can even publish the portraits you create in your own books and games.
Mark a portrait as a favorite, and come back later to update it with new outfits or gear. Keep multiple versions to show how your character looks in town, on adventure, or in disguise. You can make as many portraits as you want; there is no additional cost for each one.
You can even export portraits directly into World Anvil — one of the world’s best campaign management tools — to add more personality to your character or your campaign.
Portrait Workshop isn’t just a cool idea; we’ve actually built it. All the portraits on this page and the demo in the project video are real output from the app, not mockups.
You can use Portrait Workshop to illustrate a broad and inclusive range of player and non-player characters. Everything in this “What Can You Draw?” section is included in the Basic reward.
Races & Ethnicities
You’ll be able to make portraits of dwarves, elves, half-elves, gnomes, halflings, humans, orcs, and half-orcs.
There is only one human race, but it contains a wonderful diversity of ethnicities and cultures. Portrait Workshop includes Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, English, Germanic, Greek, Latino, Malinke, Mongol, Persian, Roman, and Viking elements.
Classes
Portrait Workshop covers the classic classes (barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, warlock, and wizard) as well as a range of NPCs (commoner, royalty, merchant, and more). You can also create characters that go beyond the typical archetypes… If you want a battle wizard wearing plate armor with a sword and staff, go for it!
Gear
The Basic reward includes nearly all the weapons and armor from the Player’s Handbook®, along with several accessories. Advanced backers may get additional gear depending on which Stretch Goals are unlocked.
Clothing
You can dress your characters in a wardrobe of over three dozen garments suitable for a wide range of adventurers and NPCs. You can layer up to five items of clothing to create a variety of different looks.
Each garment can be colored in many ways. By default, Portrait Workshop applies one of our professionally designed, color-coordinated palettes. You can change palettes with a single click, or with the Masterwork Tools (included in the Advanced reward), you can select every color individually.
Bodies
People come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Portrait Workshop covers a range, from fantasy archetypes to more “everyday” body shapes. You can use it to illustrate a range of ages and different levels of physical beauty.
Hair
All backers get over three dozen hairstyles, as well as facial hair and stubble. Advanced backers may get even more, depending on which Stretch Goals are unlocked.
We want to give the gaming community the best tool ever for creating character portraits.
We have already built alpha versions of the iOS and Android apps, have worked out the technical, artistic, and product design details, and have commissioned enough artwork to validate the approach. Now it’s up to you to help make it a reality by backing this Kickstarter so that we can complete the remaining artwork.
Plus, this project funds great artists doing a whole lot of work — a cause we can all get behind!
Now that we have exceeded our initial funding goal, things get even more exciting as we start unlocking the 15 Stretch Goals below. We’d love your input on which one we should unlock next.
Backers can vote for their favorite Stretch Goal (see the Updates section for a link). Each time we hit an additional $5000, we will unlock the next Stretch Goal with the most votes.
If you are excited about this project, please tell your friends. The more backers we have, the more Stretch Goals we can unlock… which means even better portraits!
Our target timeline is:
After our backers have the final app, we’ll release Portrait Workshop to the public as a free app with Basic controls and limited artwork. The free app will include a fraction of the outfits, hairstyles, and facial features that our Basic backers receive, with only humans and none of the Stretch Goal content. Additional artwork and features will be available via in-app purchase.
By backing this Kickstarter, you are getting significant savings from the cost of the same features and artwork when the app goes public.
Artwork: We have completed the artistic design including formal art style guide, templates, and references. We’ve assembled a team of talented artists who have contributed to what you see on this page. We are working with multiple artists to ensure we can handle the high volume of artwork needed if all Stretch Goals are unlocked. The main remaining risk is that some of the Stretch Goal content packs could be delayed. Software: We have already written an alpha version of the software. It is running on both iOS and Android, and you can see it being used in the project video. All the images on this page are actual output of the software; these are not Photoshop mockups. We still have some work to do on certain secondary features including some of the Masterwork controls, in-app purchase, and performance tuning. If that takes longer than expected, it could delay the release of the app.