If you’ve been following the Ultra Street Fighter 4 announcements at all, then you’re aware Rolento will be making his debut in the Street Fighter 4 series. Prior to his announcement we had his character portrait made. You can read more about the process below in this week’s Ayano blog!

Hello everyone, Tomoaki Ayano here!

We’re finally out of the dog days of August! It’s getting a bit cooler here in Tokyo—I used to have my air conditioner running all the time, but this morning I woke up and found my room to be a bit too cold. I don’t know if my body can keep up with the rapidly fluctuating temperature changes!

Anyway, as the last character portrait entry was well received, I’d like to keep things going and cover all the new characters. Today’s batter is none other than Rolento!

The first step, of course, is coming up with a cool pose.

The main theme was a disciplined military man. Most of the team felt that B was the best fit for Rolento’s image; however, there was one guy who’d been playing Rolento for quite some time, and he pointed out that Rolento is known for his aerial, acrobatic attacks. This being the case, B seemed a little too simple, so we decided to go with something that showed him in action instead, which is how we settled on A. C is cool too…but a little scary.

Next is the background.

We told the designers we wanted something that made you feel like he was jumping right at you, and this is what they came back with. B certainly does give the feeling that he’s jumping out at us…but it might be taking things a bit too far! Our Rolento player also pointed out that Rolento needs something above him in order to use his Take No Prisoners move, so we decided to go with A. Also, the grenades are a nice touch.

With Elena’s portrait we were able proceed to the next stage after choosing the background, but in Rolento’s case we needed a few extra touches to find the right balance between the background and the character position.

This is the revised version. Can you spot the differences between this and the original draft?

…Give up? We moved the position of the crane and added a couple of jets. This achieves a good balance with Rolento at the point of interest in the center of the picture.

The next step is colorizing it!

It was a natural choice to add the brush stroke effect to Rolento’s baton. At this stage the portrait was 90% complete. If we’d asked the designers for a huge change—such as changing the pose—it probably would’ve reduced them to tears. It’s not often that we ask for changes when things are almost complete, but it’s not completely unheard of.

Now for the finishing touches to give it that Super SFIV feel!

That’s all for this week. See you again next week!