Commission brief · October 2026

Aropria character art brief

Concept art for the seven peoples of Aropria, and a small paid pilot of modular portrait parts, for The Fourth Epoch.

Phase 1
Budget up to US$3,000, rights included
No generative AI

The project

The Fourth Epoch is a fantasy wiki about the continent of Aropria, built from about 120,000 words of lore, and a weekly decision game set in Hope's Reach, a young frontier town in the nation of Karg. Each player makes one character, who lives in the town week by week. One developer builds it, and it is made for phones first. Everything about the peoples below is in the wiki.

The site reads like a chronicle kept by scholars: ink on cold, pale paper, with one amethyst accent. Purple is the colour of congruence, the world's magic. We are not after parchment textures, torn edges, wax seals, rune borders or dragons.

The one firm rule: no generative AI

Every stage, from gathering references to the final export, must be your own hand. That rules out text- or image-to-image generation, generative fill or expand, AI upscaling, text-to-vector, AI auto-trace, and AI-generated references.

Dated sketches and the layered source files are part of the delivery. In return, we will never use your work to train an AI.

What Phase 1 is

Part A

Seven species concept sheets

One sheet for each playable species: a main figure, callouts showing how individuals differ, and a head study in the portrait's three-quarter turn.

Part B

A portrait-kit pilot

Eleven interchangeable parts for a Human portrait on a shared canvas, to prove the method before the full kit.

If the pilot works, Phase 2 is the full kit for all seven species, quoted from the pilot's per-part rate, and Phase 3 adds more Kin animal families. Neither is promised, but whoever does Phase 1 is the first person we ask.

Style

Ink line work with flat washes, like a naturalist's field sketchbook. Line carries the drawing, and colour supports it.
Muted, natural colour. Glows follow the lore (a Synthoid's runs from light blue to amber), and purple belongs to congruence.
The species as they live across Aropria. A figure might be a hero, a farmer, a scholar or a traveller: whoever shows the species best, dressed for who they are.
Each figure is one individual. The art becomes canon for the species, so the main figure shows what every member shares, and the callouts show how individuals differ: markings, styles, builds.

References

For the qualities above, not to copy. Each line says what to look at.

Ink line with flat washes

Arthur Rackham, Rip Van Winkle (1905): a pen line carries the drawing, with thin, quiet watercolour under it. The closest single reference.
Moebius, Le Monde d'Edena: even contours, little hatching, colour as flat fields.
Paul Gravett, "Hergé & The Clear Line": the line is the structure, and flat colour sits inside it.

A naturalist's field sketchbook

Leonardo da Vinci, cats, lions and a dragon: one animal in many poses on one sheet, and an invented creature studied as if from life.
James Gurney on the origins of Dinotopia: a fictional explorer's journal modelled on 19th-century field sketchbooks.
John Muir Laws on nature journaling: drawings surrounded by notes and observations.

Muted, natural colour

Beatrix Potter's fungi watercolours: earthy washes on bare pale paper; each specimen whole, in section and from below.
Katsushika Hokusai, Hokusai Manga: black line with only a pale tint. Ignore the yellowed paper.

Concept sheets with callouts

David Revoy, Pepper&Carrot sketchbook: drawn working model sheets with expressions, costume variations and silhouettes.
The art of Pentiment: a first design beside its redesign, and a hand-drawn sheet of expressions per character. Ignore the parchment frame.

Modular portrait parts

Lisa Wischofsky's Lorelei avatars: fine black line work, every feature swapping on its own. The nearest thing to the kit.
Wildermyth's image layers: hand-painted heroes as stacked layers, with hair split behind and in front.
Picrew's guide to building image makers: how one hairstyle is drawn on two layers. The method only; we don't point at individual makers.

Part A: the concept sheets

Main figure: Standing, three-quarter or full length: a hero, a citizen or anyone between, dressed for who they are.
Callouts: Two or three, showing individual variation (listed for each species below).
Head study: Head and shoulders in the three-quarter turn the portraits will use.
Kin: Six heads or busts, one per starting family, instead of one main figure. Quote it separately if it costs more.
Files: Digital, at least 3,000 px on the long edge, plain background. A flattened PNG and the layered source file.

The descriptions below come from each species' page in the wiki, which you are welcome to read in full. Where the lore is silent, propose something; once approved at the sketch stage, it becomes canon.

Humans

Wiki page

The most numerous people on Aropria, found across the whole continent. The kit's pilot is Human, so this sheet sets the base for the portraits.

Everyone shares: No claws, fur or natural defence; ordinary human proportions.
Varies: Age, build, skin tone and features from across a continent; hair and beards; dress.

Alium

Wiki page

Descendants of extraterrestrials stranded long ago, when their colony ship was lost.

Everyone shares: Hairless, grey skin, elongated limbs, and large bulbous eyes full of speckles of light like stars. A mouth but no voice: they speak by telepathy. Androgynous to human eyes.
Varies: Long swaths of brightly coloured fabric wrapped around body and head, because they are always cold. Intricate temporary dye tattoos, common among the young. How each presents gender, which is up to the individual.

Cryptum

Wiki page

A consciousness that woke in a reanimated body. Widely distrusted, so many hide in plain sight.

Everyone shares: The body of a Human, an Alium or a Kin, looking like that host species. Silver scars: every wound a Cryptum survives closes in silver, and it is the species' key feature. Decay stopped at the moment of waking.
Varies: The host: show a Human, an Alium and a Kin. Where the scars run, and the damage that killed the body; a missing limb with a simple prosthetic. Concealment: heavy clothing and wraps, or the dress of a pedlar.
Avoid: Gore. Damage is shown as it has healed, quietly. Tattoos and ritual scars are rare among Cryptum.

Kin

Wiki page

Ordinary animals woken into people by eating a wild plant. The second most numerous people, and the most varied: "a fox, or a heron, or a cart horse."

Everyone shares: A standing, human-shaped version of the animal that always shows it: ears, tail, muzzle or beak, horns, wings folded down the back, and the animal's own fur, feathers or scales from head to foot, never patches on human skin. Colouring carries over from the animal. Four feet tall at the smallest, seven or eight at the largest. Nobody mistakes a Kin for a Human.
Starting families: Canine (dog, wolf, fox) · feline (cat, lynx) · bear · deer · rodent (mouse, rat, squirrel) · bird of prey (hawk, eagle, owl).
Varies: The animal within a family, colouring and markings.

Ophidians

Wiki page

Rarely seen traders who will offer you the deal of a lifetime.

Everyone shares: One creature made of about two hundred small serpents, the medaga, twined into a human shape (legs, torso, arms, fingers, head) under a shared mind. Usually fully covered: hood, gloves, shoes.
Varies: The hood and coverings; how much of the coiled serpents shows; the eyes in the hood's shadow (there might be too many eyes staring back at you); beads, baubles and shiny trinkets, which they love.
Avoid: Horror. Ophidians are polite, self-reliant and, in one traveller's words, "an absolute delight".

Primordials

Wiki page

Beings that congruence builds out of the earthen elements around them. Rare, and rarely described the same way twice.

Everyone shares: Always a blend of elements, never just one: ice, stone, volcanic rock, earth. Awakened Primordials usually take a human shape with human-like features, built of hardened fragments. Their bodies are solid.
Varies: The blend: show at least two, such as mostly ice with some stone, and volcanic rock with earth. What grows in place of hair (ice crystals, in the one account we have). Eye colour. Garments of vines.

Synthoids

Wiki page

An artificial people who live about a thousand years. Only some ten thousand on the continent.

Everyone shares: A metal body around a pearl-sized core of crystallised congruence. Limbs float, with small gaps where joints would be, bridged by very thin vines. The core and joints glow. No gender.
Varies: Each artisan builds in a distinctive style, so show two or three artisans' work. The glow, from light blue in youth to dark amber in age. Nicks and scars from a long life.

Part B: the portrait-kit pilot

Players will build a portrait for their character by choosing parts (a face shape, hair, eyes and so on) and colours. The site stacks the chosen parts into one image and colours them. This pilot tests the method on eleven Human parts before we commission the full kit.

We want a three-quarter turn, to see how it holds up when parts are swapped. If it doesn't, the full kit may face front.

Framing: Head and shoulders, three-quarter turn, on a 4:5 canvas.
Template: First, a master guide head marking where the eyes, nose, mouth and ears sit. Every part is drawn to it.
Canvas: One artboard, 800 × 1000 units, the same origin for every part, with no transforms or clipping.
Lines: One colour at a consistent weight. In vector, expand strokes to shapes.
Colour: Flat, closed fill shapes under the lines, one per colour region, named by what they colour: skin, hair, iris, cloth. The site recolours them.
Format: SVG preferred: one file per part, on the shared artboard. Raster accepted: a transparent PNG at 1600 × 2000 px per part, with the lines and each colour region on separate layers.

Layer order, back to front

Back hair
Shoulders, neck and collar
Face shape
Ears
Eyes
Brows
Nose
Mouth
Front hair

The eleven pilot parts
Part	What we need	Count
Base	Shoulders, neck and one collar	1
Face shape	Two clearly different shapes, such as narrow and broad	2
Ears	One pair	1
Eyes	Two sets	2
Brows	One set	1
Nose	One	1
Mouth	One	1
Hair	Short (a front layer only) and long (back and front layers)	2
Total		11

Every combination has to line up. Two face shapes, two sets of eyes and two hairstyles make eight portraits, and the ears, eyes, nose and mouth must sit right on both faces. We assemble all eight in a test page, in light and dark themes, and send you the results.

Terms

Rights: a written transfer of copyright to us for everything delivered, released milestone by milestone as each is paid. You keep the right to show the work in your portfolio once we have published it.
Credit: your name and a link to your portfolio on the site's credits page.
No generative AI, and no AI training on your work, as above.
Revisions: tell us your usual revision policy in your reply, and we will settle it in the contract.
Payment: a deposit, then at the milestones marked below, through a platform with escrow such as VGen or Dribbble, or directly.
Contract: one written agreement covering all of this, signed before any work starts.

Milestones

One sheet is finished first, so the style is settled before it is repeated six times. The pilot is tested while its parts are still rough, when a part that doesn't line up is cheap to fix.

The concept sheets

Agreement and deposit.
Style frame: the Human sheet, from thumbnails to finished. It fixes the line, the wash and the palette for every sheet after it. Payment
Thumbnails for the other six sheets, two or three options each. We choose.
Sketches with a colour rough, each checked against its species page. Revisions happen here.
Finals for the six, with layered sources and process files. Payment

The pilot, once the style frame is approved

Master template: the three-quarter guide head, drawn from the Human sheet's head study.
Rough parts: all eleven, rough but on the template. We assemble the eight combinations in both themes and send back what doesn't line up.
Final parts: clean line art with fill shapes in the agreed format, sources and process files, and your per-part rate for the full kit. Payment

Rights in each batch pass to us when it is paid for.

How to reply

Reply to the person who sent you this brief, with:

A portfolio link, and two or three pieces closest to this brief.
Your rate for the seven sheets (the Kin sheet separately if it differs) and for the pilot.
An estimated per-part rate for a full kit, if you can give one.
The tools you work in, and whether you can deliver vector.
Your usual revision policy: how many rounds, and at which stages.
Any layered or modular work you have done, such as sprites or avatar-maker parts.
When you could start, and a rough schedule.
Confirmation that you work without generative AI and can deliver process files.