Are there rules for creating 'Portraits'?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: In an attempt to keep the SWAG Rogues Gallery consistent for viewers, in order to get flagged as a Portrait, the submitted image must meet a few basic criteria.

  • The content must be restricted to a portrait in the traditional sense, meaning a bust of the character -- shoulders and up. Full body shots will not qualify as a portrait. Waist and up shots will also not qualify.
  • While there are no restrictions to the medium that you use to create the portrait, low-contrast images will not likely meet the criteria. One of the most important aspects for the Rogues Gallery is to allow people to print out the portrait and stick it with their character sheet. As a result, a printer-friendly medium is a must. Pencils are one of the harder mediums in which to accomplish this -- certainly not all pencil/graphite images are excluded, but low-contrast, lighter-weight sketches will not make it.
  • Next, the height and width of the image should rougly be a 2 to 3 ratio. In other words, a 6 cm wide image would need to be about 9 cm tall. The final size is not important (within the normal restrictions), just that the ratio is roughly about what you'd expect from a portrait shot with a camera.
  • Lastly, your image will have a black border approximately 5 pixels wide added to it, so that when printed it has a solid look on a character sheet. You may choose to add your own type of styled border, but this tiny black outline will be added either way.