Art References

Quick Disney-style lighting tutorial by Wickfield

dust-in-my-eyes:

In case that title isn’t descriptive enough…this is the tutorial I promised last night.

OKAY it is really pretty easy to do.  I use GIMP but this will work in photoshop too I’m sure.

STEP 1: Get your figure and import it into a new image.  This is a pic of Marco in peasant!mode which I drew in Inkscape so I could get lines thin enough to match the Disney style.  Also for more Disney magic be sure to color the lineart.

STEP 2: Eventually I want to be able to draw my own backgrounds but for this experiment I just searched something like “renaissance castle interior” and found a picture I liked.  I moved it into a layer behind Marco and set it to Gaussian Blur 10px, and then I set the layer to “Multiply”.

STEP 3: For the shading, I determined the light source and did some basic cell shading with the pen/path tool (drew the shadows then filled the selection).  I did these shadows in dark brown, then Gaussian blurred the layer at 5 px to get the fuzzy outline.  I set the layer to “Grain Merge” at 68% opacity.

STEP 4: To get the background to be colored and match Marco, I made a layer filled with #b05e2c and moved it behind the background image which was set to “Multiply,” so this colored layer is at the very bottom of the stack.  I then made a new layer the same dark brown as the shadows, set it to “Multiply” 18%, and moved it to the very top.  These two layers you can fiddle with to make the background different colors, by changing the colors of these layers or changing the opacity of the top multiply layer.

That’s pretty much it - I just flatten the image, crop, and resize it!

OPTIONAL: You can make the image look like one of those old-school Disney storybook scans by flattening the image, then using the “HSV Noise” filter with a “holdness” of 1.  It makes it grainy and kind of low-res.

razorsaw:

That new Pokemon looks like a digimon.

No. Stop that.

We get this every god damn time a new Pokemon is shown off, and I’m going to tell you why that’s dumb. Let’s start by looking at the “original” art of each franchise’s respective mascots, Pikachu and Agumon.

Let’s look at both series’ respective design styles. Pikachu, the Pokemon, is essentially a combination of geometric shapes. He’s circles and triangles, very few internal lines, and overall, there is a significant lack of detail. Whereas Agumon’s design emphasizes lumps, jagged and blunt shapes, along with sinewy detail and musculature.

Now, of course, both series’ art styles have evolved over the years. Let’s look at some of Pikachu and Agumon’s most recent iterations.

Let’s start with Pikachu again. Now, Pikachu’s lost weight, looks more athletic, but he’s still a collection of simple shapes and lines. His body is more like a bean bag plush, and what muscles you can see are again, simple lines.

As for Agumon, he’s lost a lot of sinew and muscle detail. In this case, Digimon seems to have taken more from Pokemon than the other way around. However, they still use a lot more lines and a lot more final detail than the Pikachu drawing. From the simple hatching of Agumon’s claws, to his wrist straps, to his inner jaws and rows of individual teeth, he’s uses a lot more lines than Pikachu does.

Now let’s move on one Pokemon who is often compared to a digimon, and a digimon that is often compared to him.

Renamon, Lucario. Lucario, Renamon. Oh, I see you all know each other. From where? Oh, all the internet porn. I should have guessed.

Now at first glance, these two look rather similar. They’re both based on canids, they’re both humanoid, and they both have large upper thighs and digitigrade legs.

Keep in mind, however, that Renamon is from the later school of digimon design, after they started getting simpler like Agumon up there. If anything, this is a sign of Digimon being influenced by POKEMON, and not the other way around.

But even then, there are some important differences. Lucario does use a lot more lines than Pikachu, but he is more or less put together like a jigsaw puzzle. The angles are simpler, always form basic shapes, and within themselves, again lack extra detail.

In Renamon’s case, she is less artistically “constructed” than Lucario is. The most Pokemon-like elements ofher design are her head, her ears, and those… whatever they are’s on her shoulders. The rest of her body is designed less with basic geometric shapes in mind and more to create a sense of semi-realistic muscle tone and bodily curves. What’s more, look at the “fluff” of her chest fur; the frayed parts of it curve and point in different directions, while being of variable width. The analogous detail on Lucario is composed of basic triangles of similar width and are notably fewer in number.

So, going off of that, let’s take a look at the newly announced Pokemon with a connection to Mewtwo, which was revealed today, the original Mewtwo, and a digimon that debuted in 2012 named Arresterdramon.

Now which one does “New Mewtwo” resemble more?

(via coresilence)