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While comparing a couple of sprites I made, I noticed something interesting. Sometimes I have a clear outline, but sometimes I manage to seamlessly merge the shading into the outline so that you cannot tell where the shading ends and the outlines begin. It’s like a painting. I love it! So I decided to try doing that again.
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Clear outline
blended outline
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But what to draw? Hmm… it has been awhile since I last drew Misty. Let’s find a good pose for her. Ooh! I think I could do something fun with this one.
Inspiration
Created by: Maagori
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I have been making a ton of large pixel art over the past couple of years. With larger sprites I tend to use the same techniques as I do with large artwork. In fact at this point the process is identical except with a couple of added steps. I just resize and trace over my sketch in Aseprite to create pixel outlines, and I posterize the shading to reduce the colors down to a limited palette.
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These are perfectly plausible sprites. For example, Donkey Kong Country’s title screen uses 99 colors. My pictures have far fewer colors than that. A Super Nintendo could totally display these.
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99 colors17 colors
59 colors
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After a day, this is what I ended up with. I tried to use strong contrast and add shading to the outline edges to blend them together. The effect mostly works with her shorts but her skin ended up being too pale to completely pull it off. Maybe I should have gotten even more aggressive with the shading? But then I got distracted by the obvious color banding and decided to try dithering to blend things more smoothly.
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I tried using my Photoshop dithering technique, but the details started to get lost in the grainy texture.
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And dithering with “Save for Web” creates a lot of distracting stray pixels in the highlights.
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Next I tried using PixelOver because it gives me more control over how large the dithering areas are. But I didn’t like how it mixed colors into places they didn’t belong, and the shirt lost a lot of detail.
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So next I tried making PixelOver dither a grayscale image and then apply color to it in Photoshop. This seemed better. But it added way too many colors. This didn’t seem very efficient. Not everything needed 8 shades.
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So I tried telling PixelOver to re-create the same posterizing that I had in Photoshop. This was a painstaking process because I had to export every color area into PixelOver as a separate picture so that I could manipulate them separately.
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This finally gave me some nice smooth skin shading. But now everything was too light. I also didn’t like how Caterpie looked and the shirt still had less detail.
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For some reason I couldn’t get Pixelover to export a dark enough picture to achieve better contrast, so instead I just adjusted things in Photoshop and excluded some areas to use my old shading instead so I could get the best of both.
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Then I added a bluish tint to the shadow areas to make those colors more similar to each other. This tint allowed those colors to combine more easily when I reduced the palette. After all, monochromatic colors are interchangeable. Therefore partially monochromatic colors are somewhat interchangeable, and look less out-of-place next to each other. As a result I managed to crunch this down to 39 colors without the background.
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The tint also made the sprite fit in with the nighttime background as well.
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Oh yeah, I also threw in a background real quick. Nothing special. I just downloaded an anime forest background and crunched the colors down in PixeOver. I did add a bright orange splotch to imply the glow of a camp fire, and I added some cast shadows for the characters.
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A day later I just couldn’t help myself and tried one more experiment. This time skipped all the manual posterizing, and just let PixelOver generate a new 40 color palette from the smoothly shaded picture and quickly dither everything. This is a lot faster and it looks good… almost too good if there is such a thing. I know I’m being silly here. It’s all subjective. But it barely looks like hand-crafted pixel art anymore. Instead it looks like what it is: Regular artwork with a manual pixel outline and automated dithering. Which isn’t a bad thing. After all the goal is to make the best art possible within a limited resolution and limited color palette and I have accomplished exactly that.
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I guess that just means I succeeded at making a “pixel-art painting.” That’s the idea that inspired all this madness.
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To recap here are the four major versions of this picture.
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In the end I worked on this picture for about 4 days. I don’t think I ever spent so long on one picture before. But about 3 of those days were just spent nitpicking and experimenting with the dithering and palette.
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What can I say? I love adjusting things. I love a good puzzle, and I had a bunch of interesting ideas I wanted to try out. It was a perfect storm of motivation.
