Whether you have put some effort in your character’s portrait to make it stand out of the crowd, because you want to show your apparel, because you enjoy creating portraits, because you want to match the group you’re part of, or any other reason - I’m glad you did!
Many characters in EVE gaze into the camera with emotionless eyes with default pose and default clothes. Which is a shame, as the portrait generator in EVE is a great tool that gives players a lot of control to create their own unique faces in this game. Put some effort in your character portraits! 
In this thread:
- tips and tricks on how you create portraits
- and share your portraits
- (also feel free to share feedback)
How to change your portrait
- Dock up at any station or structure
- Click the button Character Customization, which is one of the options above the Undock button:
Station Interior
By default you have a lot of clothing and other accessory options.
If you wish to put on special clothes or accessories, you can buy them at the regional market from other players under Apparel:
Regional Market
The items are sold by other players, so the prices can wildly vary from tens of billions of ISK expensive to less than a million ISK, so there probably will be things available in trading hubs that you could afford to buy.
Alternatively you can buy pieces of clothing in the ingame New Eden Store (NES) for PLEX. These items are tradable (like all apparel), so do compare prices with the regional market because players may sell those same items cheaper when they got them at a discount or don’t need them anymore.
To add the clothes you bought to your portrait:
Make sure the item is in the station hangar where you are docked when you open the character customization window. Now those items will show up as option in the character customization window.
Unlike ship skins these clothes will not be consumed by your character, but if you use a piece of apparel in your portrait that item will be gone from your station hangar until you decide to make another picture in which you do not use that item. When you stop using an item that is part of your portrait by making a new picture the item you no longer use will appear in your station inventory again.
Now that you know how to create a portrait, on to the tips and tricks…
Try everything
While this is only an option when you first create the character, there are many ways to modify the face structure and body of your character, try it all and see if you can make something unique!
There are many sliders for many parts of the face and body. And also try turning the character around to look at it from a different angle - you can often move parts in multiple directions.
Unique features
Using the sliders to their maximum or minimum height/length/whatever is what many people will be doing if they touch those sliders at all during character creation - if you want your character to be unique, it can be nice use a different value.
Next is a bit of personal preference, but you have a lot of options when it comes to adding unique features to your character’s face. Ticking all the boxes of face tattoos, piercings, white eyes, glasses, a scar, eye shadow, eye liner, blush and a facial augmentation may sound menacing but in reality may look like a toddler with crayons drew on it while your character were asleep.
My advice: use moderation!
Pick only one or two recognisable features, for example piercings and tattoos; glasses and facial augment; scar and eye implant; etc. Pick something that defines your character.
Test server apparel
‘Try everything’ can be expensive when there are so many options of clothing and your wallet isn’t flowing over with ISK.
Do you want to know how a certain expensive facial augment looks on your character in combination with another piece of apparel that you do not have? Go to the test server and buy it all for 100 ISK, create your portrait there and see if it fits!
I have used this trick many times to decide which pieces of apparel to buy on the main server for my characters.
(Keep in mind that not all things on the test server are available or for sale on the main server though.)
Posing and light
Picking the right light and pose can completely change how visible or recognisable a portrait is. With light and shadow you can accentuate or hide facial features.
You are not limited to the light angles you can choose - you have a lot of control over where the shadows and light falls by turning the head of your character.
Facial expression
Nothing is worse for your portrait than the default dead stare.
Once you’ve made your character it’s really simple to breathe life into it by slightly turning the iris, twisting the chin a bit, moving a corner of the mouth and raising an eyebrow or two: suddenly your character will seem much more alive, more real.
Saving and sharing portraits
Ingame you can rightclick a character’s portrait and select ‘capture portrait’. The portrait will end up on your Documents/EVE/capture/portraits folder.
Alternatively you can go to the very useful third party website of https://evewho.com/ to find your character and get a link to your character’s portrait there, like this: https://images.evetech.net/characters/2112743738/portrait
From there you can copy paste them into this thread, or rename them and store them in other folders to keep track of older versions of your portraits. I’ve done that for most of my characters so I can see how they changed over time.
Examples - my own portraits
Gerard - you may recognise his (edit: old) portrait from the forum. (Newer version is in a later post)
May be seen orbiting ice, ore or gas clouds - I haven’t mined in ages though.
If online, she can often be found in rookie help chat to keep me busy while flying stuff around in space.
She’ll keep a (mechanical) eye on you.
Your friendly logi and mining boost support pilot, can you tell?
Currently just another PI alt, but I eventually have big plans for him.
We once created a bunch of Talwar pilots with the corporation. The suit is suiting, don’t you think?
His favourite weapons are lasers, of course.
That’s it for now.
Share your own portraits, portrait tricks and feedback below! I love to see what you created!
