Red Lotus in Colour by @Thorvald (El Thorvaldo)

I've got to hand it to Reus: he was in Imperium Offtopicum—his first IOT—for barely three months, and already he had cemented himself in the subforum by taking the initiative in realizing a Civilization IV mod focusing on our eccentric community. While the current scope of the project is largely confined to the participants ourselves, that hasn't stopped me experimenting for my own purposes, drafting a handful of game-specific factions as modding practice and proofs of concept. The Scarlet Lancers were one of them.

Civ4 has a rather peculiar protocol for reading images: while leaderhead backgrounds and faction flags display upright in game, the files themselves have to be saved at a square resolution. Recently as I was revising some graphics, I discovered that the dimensions we'd been applying to leader portraits were off by 3%, causing them to appear slim and necessitating the complete overhaul of pretty much everything except interface icons. As part of my repairs, I took the opportunity to add backgrounds to a couple of characters whose original illustrations had none; at first I desaturated the photos to match the greyscale of the sketches, but since that looked boring and clashed with everything else, I started playing around with colours; it worked so well that I stuck through it, and this is the result.

The colouring itself is childishly simple, with the original pencil shading providing ready texturing that I probably wouldn't have had the patience to do myself. Turns out I might've found a window into colour after all; if I can finally get around to making those touch-ups to the source sketch, I may just take a stab at colouring the whole thing.

Background is an edited photo of Tiananmen Square.

[Originally submitted to DeviantArt April 2014.]