This is a coloration of Renamon brushing her fur in the moonlight
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This sprite was created from one of Furball’s old sketches.
Ancient sketch from 2002
Created by: Furball
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While making
this picture
, I discovered that pixel outlines could make even crappy sketches look great, because shrinking the sketch “erases” most of the wobbles in the lines. And correcting a few stray pixels in the sprite is much faster and easier than hammering CTRL+Z while redrawing an imperfect line a dozen times.
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So I felt like experimenting with “inking” other old sketches. Maybe something that was never finished. I dug up one of the oldest sketches drawn by one of my favorite artists, Furball… Which to be fair is hardly “crappy” so I did not really push the limits of this technique. Maybe next time I’ll look for a real challenge.
Ancient sketch from 2002
Created by: Furball
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I also saw a picture by Itzah that used a really interesting shading technique. A fascinating combination of cel shading and banded sprite shading, where only the shadow areas have detail. So I thought I would try experimenting with that too.
Shading Technique
Created by: Itzah
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At the same time I was also recommending an old favorite artist called ShadowSquirrel, who did some incredible things with semi-monochromatic color palettes.
Monochromatic Palettes
Created by: ShadowSquirrel
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I decided to keep the outline aliased to test how well sprite outlining could clean up a sketch without any “extra help” such as anti-aliasing. I figured the hard lines would also match with the hard cell shading of the moonlight.
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Admittedly, these were a lot of experiments to try all at once. And I struggled to create a “monochromatic” palette that portrayed a bright yellow digimon bathed in pale blue moonlight with cold midnight shadows. It was a back and forth tug-of-war between completely opposite color temperatures. The result was, well… greenish gray.
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Finally I said “Screw it” and went back to good ‘ol reliable Gradient Maps and just threw a color tint over it all. Let Photoshop figure out how to mix warm and cool colors at the same time. Besides, Renamon just looks weird without her white areas. So… not completely monochromatic.
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I crunched down the palette in PixelOver and was about ready to call this picture done, but… something was bugging me. It just didn’t look right. The sharp jaggy edges of the moonlight clashed with the soft style of the shading. It looked out of place. I needed to blend the edges.
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… so I anti-aliased the moonlight. Now it matches!
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Of course with only two overall color tones it was easy to bring it down to about 15 colors. You know, like some kind of crazy oversized Super Nintendo sprite.
