Souls & Anime Fan Art Commissions: Tribute Portraits Done Right

Daichi messaged me on a Wednesday in late October with a single sentence: "I want a portrait of my Tarnished that doesn't look like a Pinterest board." He had been collecting Elden Ring screenshots for a year. He had a folder of Yoshitaka Amano scans, a couple of Mobius Final Fantasy renders, and a pinned image of a Genshin character he liked the eyes on. He knew exactly what he wanted, except he didn't. What he wanted was the feeling of those references painted properly, not the surface of them traced.

This guide is for the Daichis. The clients who have grown up on FromSoftware bosses and Studio Ghibli skies and Genshin splash art, who walk into a commission with a strong visual vocabulary but very little language for what to ask for. It's also for the clients who want fan art of a character they love and aren't sure how to even bring that up with an artist. There is a real, calm, grown-up conversation to be had about Souls-style and anime-style commissions, and most studios won't have it with you because they're nervous about the IP question. I'd rather just talk it through.

Contents

• What "Souls style" actually means as a painting approach
• What "anime style" means, and the cell-vs-painterly fork
• Commissioning fan art of an existing character, and the IP conversation
• Commissioning an OC in this style
• Palette differences between Souls and bright anime
• The Elden Ring lighting language
• Common briefs and how I rewrite them
• What to send the artist
• Closing thoughts and how to start a brief

What "Souls style" actually means as a painting approach

People say "Souls style" like it's one thing. It isn't. There are at least three visual lineages stacked under that umbrella, and the brief you write changes depending on which one you actually want.

The first is the Dark Souls 1-3 aesthetic: muted greens and browns, oxidized metal, blood that has long since dried to rust. The light is overcast. Faces are gaunt. Armor is dented and asymmetrical because it has been worn for too long. The paintings that work in this register sit closer to Brom and Zdzisław Beksiński than to anything anime-adjacent. If you're commissioning a Souls-style portrait and you want it to feel like Dark Souls specifically, the load-bearing words in your brief are muted, weathered, overcast, and quiet.

The second is the Bloodborne aesthetic, which is Souls-style with Victorian gothic on top. Tricorn hats. Long coats. Cobblestone and gaslight. The palette tightens further, towards bone-white and dried-blood crimson. If your character is going in this direction, the brief I want from you is closer to a 19th-century portrait than a fantasy one. Reference the gothic illustrators. Reference old daguerreotypes. Tell me whether the figure is lit by gaslight from below or oil-lamp from the side, because that one decision changes how the face renders.

The third is Elden Ring, which broadened the visual language considerably. There is still grime and weight, but there is also gold leaf, soft gradient skies at dusk, and lighting that owes more to Romantic landscape painting than to dungeon horror. Elden Ring opened the door to a Souls portrait that can be beautiful rather than just oppressive, and most of my Souls commissions these days lean toward this lineage, whether the client knows the term or not.

The common thread across all three is what I'd call painterly restraint. Souls art isn't busy. It doesn't have sparkles or particles or neon rim lights or magical glow effects pasted onto every weapon. The drama comes from the figure, the silhouette, and the light hitting one surface really well. If you're sending me a reference and it has a hundred effects layered on top of the character, you're probably not actually showing me a Souls reference. You're showing me a fan piece that misread Souls.

What "anime style" means, and the cell-vs-painterly fork

Anime style splits into two cleanly different things, and clients almost always conflate them. Knowing which one you want before you write the brief saves us both a revision round.

Cell-shaded anime is what most people mean when they say "anime style." Clean ink line, flat color fills, two or three hard-edged shadow shapes, a small highlight. Personality lands fast. Eyes are large, expressive, often the focal point of the entire piece. Hair has weight and direction but the rendering stays graphic, not photographic. Genshin's character splash art is a hybrid that leans this way. So is the cover art for most modern shōnen and shōjo. This is the style I reach for when the character's personality is the load-bearing element of the brief.

Painterly anime is the second branch, and it's the one I push clients toward when the character has gravitas. Ghibli backgrounds. The Final Fantasy XIV cinematics. Older fantasy anime cover paintings from the eighties and nineties. The line is softer or absent. Color holds the form rather than ink. Light behaves like real light, with falloff and bounce, but proportions and stylization stay anime-coded. The result reads as anime, but it carries weight that cell-shading cannot. If your character is forty, scarred, and tired, painterly anime serves them better than cell-shaded ever will.

A third sub-category worth naming is manga-style monochrome, which is its own discipline built on screen-tone, hatching, and ink-wash. I take a few of these a year. They look spectacular at print size and they read beautifully alongside a chapter of original fiction. If you're commissioning an OC for a fan-fic or webcomic, this is worth considering as its own deliverable.

The cell-versus-painterly call usually comes down to age and tone of the character. Younger PC, kinetic personality, brightly colored kit, that's cell-shaded territory. Older character, complicated face, complicated feelings, that's painterly anime. If you're not sure, send me three references in each direction and we'll triangulate on a fifteen-minute call. The walkthrough on choosing a commission style breaks down the cell-versus-painterly call in more general terms, but the Souls and anime registers have their own quirks worth a dedicated section.

Commissioning fan art of an existing character, and the IP conversation

Most studios get cagey when a client asks for a portrait of Malenia or Geralt or a Genshin character, because the legal landscape is genuinely murky and saying anything definite invites trouble. I'd rather be calm and specific with you than performatively silent.

Here is what I tell every fan-art client, in plain language.

Fan art exists in a long-standing gray zone. Trademark and copyright law in most jurisdictions does protect fictional characters, and a publisher could, in theory, object to commissioned artwork that depicts their character. In practice, the industry norm for personal, non-commercial fan art has been tolerated for decades. Conventions sell aisles of it. Pixiv runs on it. Most game publishers have explicit fan-art tolerance clauses or they choose not to enforce against personal pieces.

What that means for a commission from my studio:

• Yes, I'll paint Malenia, Geralt, V from Cyberpunk 2077, Aloy, a specific Genshin character, a specific BOTW or Persona character, a specific MHA or Jujutsu Kaisen character. I do this several times a year. The painting is a personal piece for you to print, frame, hang, post on your own socials, use as a desktop wallpaper.
• No, I will not deliver a license that lets you sell prints of it, put it on merch, or use it commercially. That's not me being cautious. That's how fan-art ethics actually work. The character belongs to the publisher, the painting is my labor, and the use-case the painting was made for is personal display, not resale.
• I won't trace, photobash, or reproduce existing official artwork. The portrait is an original painting of the character: my composition, my light, my brushwork. That's the line that separates a legitimate fan portrait from a knockoff.
• I won't accept commissions for characters whose IP holders have publicly objected to fan art. That list is short, and I keep it current. If your character is on it, I'll tell you on the brief intake and suggest an OC alternative in the same style.

This isn't legal advice and I'm not a lawyer. It's how I run the studio, distilled into language a normal client can act on. The piece on commercial licensing for commissioned art goes into the licensing side in more detail, because the moment you want to sell anything tied to the work, the conversation changes completely.

Fan art is a portrait of a character you love, made for you to live with. The day you decide to print it on a hundred t-shirts is the day it stops being fan art and starts being a problem.

The one practical wrinkle: if your fan-art piece is heading anywhere that requires a license (a published book cover, a Twitch overlay you monetize, a Patreon tier reward), tell me at the brief stage. We can usually redirect to a custom OC commission in the same visual language, which gives you a piece you actually own.

Commissioning an OC in this style

An original character painted in Souls or anime style is the cleanest version of this commission, because the IP question disappears entirely. The painting is yours, the character is yours, and the style is just a stylistic choice that doesn't borrow from a specific franchise.

The brief here is a little different from a generic fantasy character commission. You're asking me to inhabit the grammar of a specific visual world without depicting any character from it. The brief has to do the heavy lifting that the franchise's existing lore would normally do.

When I take an OC brief in Souls style, I want:

• A clear genre placement (Elden Ring's Lands Between vibe, Bloodborne's gothic-Victorian, Dark Souls' lichen-and-rust kingdom, or your own equivalent world)
• One or two sentences of in-fiction context: what is this character to their world, not just what they look like
• Armor and weapon references that match the visual register (no clean fantasy armor for a Bloodborne piece, no Victorian frock coats for a Dark Souls piece)
• A note on whether the character is meant to look beaten down or freshly arrived in the world

The same approach applies to an OC brief in anime style. Tell me whether the character lives in a Ghibli-coded world (soft greens, big skies, machinery that's slightly impractical) or a Trigger-coded one (saturated, kinetic, fashion-forward) or a Persona-coded one (red-and-black urban occult). The visual grammar is the brief. If the OC is meant to live in a cyberpunk-coded near-future rather than a fantasy world, the cyberpunk character art commission guide covers the V-from-2077 crossover space where an anime-rendered cyberpunk OC sits naturally. If the OC is straight-up high fantasy with an anime rendering choice on top, the fantasy character art commission guide is the better starting point for the worldbuilding side of the brief.

A recent example: Mei commissioned an OC tarnished in mid-September. She didn't have a name for her yet, but she had ten lines of journaling about who the character was after her third death, what she was carrying that she shouldn't be, and what she was hoping to forgive when she got to the next site of grace. The reference folder was three Elden Ring screenshots and one frame from a Ghibli film for sky color. That brief was a pleasure to paint, because it gave me a soul to chase, not a costume. The piece took five weeks and shipped framed.

The companion guide on painting your own Elden Ring character walks through one of these OC briefs in much more detail, if you want to see the process unpacked.

Palette differences between Souls and bright anime

The two styles sit at opposite ends of the saturation spectrum, and a lot of failed briefs come from clients mixing references across them without realizing the palette pull they're creating.

Souls palettes are low-saturation across most of the canvas, with one or two high-chroma accents reserved for moments of emphasis. The dominant tones are oxidized greens, dried-blood reds, bone whites, charcoal blacks, and a warm gold that catches the eye precisely because everything around it is desaturated. If you pull three colors from a Souls portrait and put them on a swatch card, two of them look almost grey at small size.

Bright anime palettes are the opposite. Pink, cyan, lemon yellow, mint green, lavender, the full popsicle row. The saturation stays high across the figure, and contrast comes from value rather than chroma. Hair colors run the rainbow. Costume colors are clean and confident. The light is usually warm and even, not directional and grim.

A third register sits between them: dim anime, the palette used by stuff like Mushishi or the quieter Studio Ponoc films. Muted greens and browns, but rendered with the soft edges and stylized proportions of anime. This is where Bloodborne and an anime style overlap visually, oddly enough, and it's often where a brief that started as "Souls but anime" actually wants to land.

Here's the test I run on a reference folder before I start a brief. I open the folder, half-close my eyes, and look at it as a single colored blur. If the blur is greyish-warm with one gold dot, that's a Souls palette. If it's a rainbow, that's bright anime. If it's all olive and bone, that's dim anime. Whichever blur the references give you is the palette you'll get, regardless of what you wrote in the brief copy. So make sure the references match the words.

The Elden Ring lighting language

Elden Ring is worth a section on its own, because more clients ask for "Elden Ring vibes" than any other Souls reference, and the lighting is the thing they're actually responding to even when they think it's the armor or the setting.

The signature Elden Ring lighting is what painters would call gold-hour against a cool ambient. The sun is low. The fill light from the sky is cool: pale blue, sometimes a faint green. The key light from the sun is warm gold, raking across surfaces at an angle so steep that everything has a long shadow. Metal picks up that gold at the edge facing the sun and goes almost black on the opposite side. Skin warms on one cheek and cools on the other. Cloth gets that particular gilded-edge glow that the game pushes hard in its promotional shots.

To paint that lighting honestly, I have to make three concrete decisions on the canvas:

• Where the sun is, exactly, in degrees off the figure's face (usually low-right, behind the character, casting a halo)
• How much haze is in the air between us and the figure (Elden Ring uses atmospheric perspective heavily, so distant elements desaturate and warm)
• How much bounce the ground gives back into the figure's shadow side (often a faint gold from grass or stone, which keeps the shadows from going truly black)

A brief that says "Elden Ring lighting" without giving me those three answers is a brief I'll have to make decisions on without you. Most of the time that's fine. But if you have a specific shot from the game burned into your head, like Margit's silhouette against the sunset or Malenia's halo against the bloom, tell me that. I'll look at the same screenshot. The piece on painting Malenia and other Souls bosses as portraits walks through how I approach one of these signature-lighting briefs in practice.

The thing I keep telling clients about Elden Ring lighting is that it's generous to the figure. Elden Ring's late-day sun gives you something every portrait painter wants and rarely gets cleanly: a single warm directional key, a clean cool fill, and enough haze to soften the background without losing the figure's edge. If you bring me a brief with that lighting locked in, you've already done the hardest decision-making for me, and the painting goes faster.

Common briefs and how I rewrite them

This is the section that saves the most revision time across the studio. Here are three briefs I've seen recently, in their original form and in the rewritten form I'd send back to a client to confirm before I start painting.

Original brief 1: "I want a Souls-style portrait of my character. He's a knight. Make it cinematic."

Rewritten: "An Elden Ring-coded portrait of an OC knight, painterly, low-saturation palette with one warm gold accent on the helmet crest. Late-afternoon directional sun from low-right, atmospheric haze, long shadows. Armor is dented and weathered, not parade-clean. Mood is tired but not defeated. 3/4 view, chest-up, eyes catching the gold rim light."

Original brief 2: "Anime style, my OC, she's a mage and she's badass."

Rewritten: "Cell-shaded anime portrait of an OC fire mage. Saturated palette: magenta robes, gold trim, cyan accent on the staff orb. Kinetic three-quarter pose, hair caught in motion, expression confident and slightly smirking. Clean ink line, two-tone shadow rendering. Reference the Genshin character splash art layout, but with our studio's character design."

Original brief 3: "I want fan art of [a specific Souls boss]. Just like the official art."

Rewritten: "Fan-art portrait of [character], an original Design Vortex composition rather than a reproduction of official artwork. Painterly, Bloodborne-leaning palette, gaslight from below, the character mid-step toward camera. Reference the official character design for accuracy of armor and silhouette, but the lighting, composition, brushwork, and surface treatment are mine. Personal-use license only, no commercial reproduction."

Three things to notice. First, the rewritten briefs are specific where the originals were vague. Second, every rewrite names the sub-style explicitly (Elden Ring-coded, cell-shaded, Bloodborne-leaning) instead of leaning on the catch-all "Souls" or "anime." Third, the fan-art rewrite makes the legal posture explicit at the brief stage so we don't have an awkward conversation at delivery. The piece on how to write a commission brief covers the underlying brief structure in more depth if you want a generic framework.

What to send the artist

For a Souls or anime commission, the reference folder is doing more work than usual, because the visual grammar is so specific. Here is the minimum I want from you, sorted by priority.

• Three to six character references of the character (if fan art) or three character designs in the visual style you want (if OC)
• Two to three palette references: screenshots, splash art, or paintings that hit the saturation level you want, even if the subjects are unrelated
• One or two lighting references: a single shot that nails the light direction and mood, even from a film or a photograph
• A pose/composition reference if you have one, otherwise let me sketch a couple of options
• A one-paragraph in-fiction note: who the character is, not just what they look like. Especially load-bearing for OCs.

What you don't need to send: a Pinterest board with eighty images, a list of every game in the franchise, a written treatise on lore. The pieces that get over-briefed tend to come out worse than the pieces that arrive with five strong references and one good paragraph.

A note on AI-generated reference images: I'll look at them, but I treat them as mood boards rather than briefs. AI-generated images often have anatomy issues, impossible armor, and lighting that doesn't physically work, and if I try to paint from an AI reference I end up reproducing those errors. Use AI images to communicate vibe. Use real artwork, screenshots, or photographs for anything load-bearing.

One more piece of advice on references for fan art specifically. Send me the version of the character that is canonical to you, even if it isn't canonical to everyone. If your Geralt is the Netflix-show Geralt rather than the CDPR-game Geralt, say so, because the silhouette and the gear are different enough that one rendering won't satisfy the other. If your Genshin character is a specific costume skin, send me the screenshot of that exact skin, not the default. These details look minor when you're writing the brief and turn into revision rounds when you see the first pass and realize the wrong version is on the canvas. A short walkthrough on Geralt of Rivia reference choices breaks this exact problem down in more detail.

Lior commissioned a Witcher fan-art piece in late August and almost shipped me eighteen references across three different visual continuities (the books, the games, the show) without flagging which one was canon for him. We had a fifteen-minute call before sketch, narrowed it to the Witcher 3 silhouette with a couple of show-coded styling tweaks on the hair, and the brief got dramatically easier to paint. Twenty minutes on the phone saved at least two revision rounds. If your fan-art brief has any cross-continuity tension in the references, just name it explicitly.

If you want a deeper read on the brief side specifically, the Souls-style commission walkthrough and the anime-style portrait guide drill into the per-style brief intake in much more detail than I can cover here.

Closing thoughts and how to start a brief

A Souls or anime commission isn't a stranger genre than fantasy or sci-fi. It just demands more specificity at the brief stage, because "Souls style" and "anime style" each contain three or four sub-styles that look nothing alike on the canvas. Spend an extra ten minutes on the references and the genre placement, and the rest of the process gets faster, not slower.

If you're commissioning fan art, write the IP question into the brief upfront so neither of us has to dance around it. If you're commissioning an OC, give me a paragraph of who they are alongside the look. Either way, the visual grammar of the world they live in is the thing I'm painting into, not just the character on top of it.

The portfolio has the closest visual references for both Souls and anime work in the studio's current voice, so start there if you're style-shopping. The character art services page lists what each style includes, and the character art commission pricing breakdown shows what the painterly Souls and anime tiers cost in real numbers. When you're ready to write the actual brief, the order form takes a couple of paragraphs and a small reference folder, and I read every intake myself before the studio quotes the piece.

If your character is sitting in your head and you can almost see them, the light hitting the helmet, the expression, the world they walked out of, that's already most of the brief. The next step is just typing it.