How to brief a fantasy character commission (species + palette + pose)

Selene emailed me on a Sunday in March with a brief that opened, "She's an elf ranger, redhead, leather armour, kind of broody, please paint her at sunset." That brief is not enough. It's also not nothing, which is the problem — it sits in a middle place where a painter has to guess at twenty smaller decisions and any one of those guesses can wrong-foot the whole portrait. This piece is the long version of the conversation I have over email with clients about turning that sentence into a brief that actually paints.

I'm Hector. I run Design Vortex, and fantasy characters are the bulk of what crosses my desk. Around two-thirds of the 200+ commissions we have shipped in two years sit somewhere on the fantasy spectrum — D&D players, fan-art clients, indie authors, GMs commissioning NPC packs. Writing a strong fantasy brief is a slightly different skill from writing a strong sci-fi or modern brief, and the existing studio post on how to write a commission brief only takes you to the genre-neutral basics. This one goes deeper, in the way that fantasy specifically demands.

If you're new to commissioning entirely, the pillar guide to fantasy character art is the broader starting point. Come back here when you're sitting down to write the actual brief.

Table of contents

• The two-minute rule for fantasy briefs
• Species and build come first, always
• Skin, hair, eyes: where to be specific and where to leave room
• Outfit and armour: the costume vs character question
• Mood and lighting as a single decision
• Pose and crop: the framing trap
• References: how many, what kind, and what to label them
• Common mistakes and how to head them off

The two-minute rule for fantasy briefs

A fantasy brief that works can be written in around fifteen minutes and read in two. Anything longer than two minutes of reading time is usually a sign that the player is hedging — adding ten qualifiers because they're afraid of being misunderstood, when what the painter needs is six confident choices.

The structure I recommend, in the order it should appear:

1. One-line pitch (15 words or fewer)
2. Species and build
3. Skin, hair, eyes (three short bullets)
4. Outfit and visible gear
5. Mood and lighting in one sentence
6. Pose and crop preference
7. Three to five reference images, labelled

That's seven sections. Sixty seconds per section to think about, ninety seconds to type. Done.

The one-line pitch is the most important sentence in the brief, and it's the one most clients skip. "A half-orc paladin who used to be a baker" tells me more in nine words than three paragraphs of backstory. Bran wrote that pitch in November and the portrait practically painted itself — the flour-dusted forearms, the warhammer that looked a little like a kitchen tool, the gentle stance.

Species and build come first, always

Fantasy is a genre where species is a costume decision, not a footnote. The species sets your silhouette, your skin and eye options, your gear scale, and your face geometry. It is the first locked-in variable. If the brief is unclear here, every later choice gets shaky.

Be specific about subspecies and lineage where it exists. "Elf" is too broad — high elf, wood elf, sea elf, drow, eladrin, half-elf all paint differently. We have a whole piece on the elf spectrum for clients who want to think through which sub-lineage their character actually sits in. The same applies to tieflings — the tiefling lineage and paint hooks article walks through subtype reads. For non-human species I always want to know:

• Sub-lineage or culture (high elf vs wood elf, hill dwarf vs mountain dwarf, etc.)
• Approximate age in their species' lifespan terms (a 200-year-old elf still looks young)
• Build (slight, average, broad, heavy, athletic) in plain words
• Height relative to a human — "shorter than most humans" or "around 6'2"

For human characters this matters less, but please still give me an approximate age band and build. "Mid-thirties, athletic but not muscular" is fine. "Forty-eight, broad, the weight of someone who has stopped training but kept eating" is much better.

Species is the silhouette. Get it wrong and the rest of the portrait fights you the whole way through.

Skin, hair, eyes: where to be specific and where to leave room

This is the section where clients either over-specify or under-specify, and both fail. Over-specifying ("auburn hair Pantone 18-1438, eyes Pantone 19-4015") strips the painter of the small judgment calls that make a portrait feel painted rather than rendered. Under-specifying ("blonde hair, blue eyes") leaves a billion possibilities open.

The right level of detail is descriptive plus one anchor:

• Skin: warm, cool, or neutral undertone, plus a tone reference. "Warm olive, around the same as Penélope Cruz." "Cool fair, freckled, sunburns easily." "Deep brown with a slight reddish undertone."
• Hair: colour family, texture, and length. "Dark auburn, slightly wavy, falls just past the shoulders." "Iron grey, coarse, cropped short on the sides."
• Eyes: colour and one note about character. "Green, slightly hooded, the kind that look tired even when she's not." "Pale blue, almost grey at distance."

Where to leave room: the exact catchlight position, the specific shadow tones in the skin, the way the hair catches rim light. Those are painter decisions. If you have a preference, mention it once and then let it go.

Outfit and armour: the costume vs character question

Outfits go wrong when the brief is a shopping list. "Leather chestpiece, steel pauldrons, fingerless gloves, a cloak, knee-high boots, a dagger on the left hip" reads like a video-game character creator. It produces video-game-character-creator-looking portraits.

A better approach is to anchor the outfit to the character's life, not their inventory. "She has been on the road for two months and her boots show it — the cloak is patched in two places where it caught on briars, the leather is more weather than armour at this point." Now the painter knows where to add weight and wear.

Three principles for fantasy costume briefs:

• Function before fashion. A ranger's gear should look like it has been used. A wizard's robe should look like it has been slept in. A paladin's armour should look like it has been dented and re-polished.
• One signature piece. Pick one item that's specific to this character and describe it in detail — a pendant, a scarf colour, a specific clasp, a sword handle wrap. Everything else can be generic-of-its-class.
• Colour discipline. Don't list more than three outfit colours plus one accent. We have a whole piece on the seven-colour rule and palette warmth if you want the longer version.

If your character is in full plate or covered armour, please think hard before committing to it. Faceless armoured portraits are technically harder to make read as a person. The Master Chief portrait piece covers the same problem from the sci-fi side — the principle is identical in fantasy.

Mood and lighting as a single decision

Mood and lighting are two halves of one choice. A "broody portrait" with morning light makes no sense. A "serene portrait" lit by torch flicker doesn't either. Pick one of each and make sure they match.

The four mood-lighting pairings that come up most often:

• Quiet / single candle — single warm point source from one side, deep shadow on the other. Reads scholarly, weary, intimate.
• Heroic / overcast daylight — flat top light, no harsh shadows, dignified. Reads weight, gravity, leadership.
• Tense / golden hour low sun — long warm rake light from one side, cool shadow opposite. Reads journey, in-motion, alert.
• Sinister / firelight from below — warm uplight, cool dark fill. Reads dangerous, conspiratorial, antagonist-coded.

Tell your painter which pairing you want in one sentence. "Lit by a single candle from frame-left, like she has been reading too long" is enough. We will pick the colour temperature and the exact angle from there.

What you should leave out: specific Kelvin temperatures, lumen counts, three-point lighting diagrams. Those are studio shorthand the painter will use, not direction you need to hand them.

Pose and crop: the framing trap

Pose is where a lot of fantasy briefs fall apart. Players ask for a "dynamic pose" because they think dynamic is the default for fantasy art. It isn't. Around 80% of the painted portraits on our wall are static — three-quarter view, hands not visible, no weapon raised. That's because static portraits show character, and dynamic poses show action. Most clients actually want character.

Pick a crop family first:

• Shoulders-up — tight, intimate, face-led. Cheapest in painting hours, often the strongest read. Default unless you have a reason.
• Bust (head to mid-chest) — shows a clasp, a pendant, the top of a weapon. Most flexible.
• Three-quarter (head to mid-thigh) — shows pose, weapon hand, costume context. More painting hours, more compositional decisions.
• Full body — only if pose is genuinely the point. Most expensive crop, hardest to get right at portrait scale.

Pick a pose register second:

• Resting — standing or seated, no weapon drawn, hands quiet. The most painted register.
• Alert — weight on one foot, hand near a weapon, gaze sharp but not aggressive.
• Active — mid-motion, weapon engaged, the harder register to paint at portrait scale.

For most commissions, ask for shoulders-up or bust crop with a resting pose. Trust me on this. Yusra's first brief asked for full-body action; we shipped a bust portrait in resting pose and the file ended up on her wall, not in a folder.

References: how many, what kind, and what to label them

Three to five reference images. Not twenty. Not zero.

The four reference types that actually help a painter:

1. A face reference — a photograph or portrait whose face shape, age, and expression approximates what you want. Not necessarily the exact look, but the right vibe.
2. A skin-and-hair-tone reference — sometimes the same image as the face reference, sometimes different.
3. An outfit reference — a painted character whose costume style hits the register you want. Or two photographs of historical garments.
4. A mood-and-light reference — a film still, a painting, a photograph whose lighting direction and warmth matches what you want.

Label each one in the brief: "Image 1 = face shape and age. Image 2 = skin tone (cooler than image 1). Image 3 = outfit register, not the exact pieces. Image 4 = lighting mood."

Unlabelled references are the single biggest source of misfire briefs. The painter cannot know whether the dramatic pose in image 2 is meant as a pose reference or just happened to be the only photograph of that actor you could find. Label them.

A note on AI-generated references: send them if you have them, but please label them clearly and don't expect the painter to match the exact result. AI references are useful for direction-of-travel — "something roughly in this neighbourhood" — and dangerous as targets, because they often contain anatomical errors that propagate into the painted version if the painter isn't careful.

Common mistakes and how to head them off

The recurring brief failures I see across two years of fantasy commissions:

• Listing every spell, weapon, and feat in the character sheet. I do not need to know that she has 14 Dexterity and proficiency in Stealth. Tell me she moves quietly. That's enough.
• Backstory as a wall of text. A 1,200-word backstory is for your campaign notebook. The brief gets the one-line pitch and maybe one extra sentence of context.
• Asking for "any style, you decide." This is a kindness but it costs the painter a day of guessing. Pick a style from the choosing-a-style guide — painterly, anime, lineart, or semi-realistic — and let the painter handle the rest.
• No height or build information at all. Two of my most-rebriefed portraits last year stalled because the player hadn't said how tall or broad their character was. The painter defaulted to "average human." It wasn't what they wanted.
• Sending the brief without proofreading. Twice in 2025 I painted "auburn" hair that the client meant "ash blonde" — they typed it wrong and didn't re-read. Twenty seconds of proofreading saves a re-paint.
• No reference for the face. Faces are the hardest part of any portrait. If you can't find a face reference, describe age in years and weight in plain words ("forty-seven, the face of someone who has worked outdoors").

I keep a checklist pinned to my monitor for incoming briefs. If a brief is missing more than two of these items, I write back with the specific questions before we start painting. It is faster for both of us than guessing.

When the brief is ready

The cleanest path: write the one-line pitch first, then sit with it for an hour before filling in the rest. The pitch is the spine. If you can't write one sentence that captures your character, the rest of the brief will wobble.

Once it's written, send it through the order form. I read every brief myself before assigning it to one of the studio painters, and if anything is missing I'll write back the same day. The portfolio has the closest visual references for what a finished commission looks like in each of our styles, and the character work page lays out what's included at each tier. The process walkthrough piece shows how a brief turns into a final painting over six weeks.

The character you've been carrying around in your head deserves a brief that does them justice. The sooner the one-line pitch lands in my inbox, the sooner the painting ends up on your wall.