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Wow, just like a manga. The quality is over the roof!!!
Really cool dither applications here. Looks kinda like a music CD cover.
Thank you! I used a Wacom tablet and Clip Studio Paint to make this. CSP is not quite optimized for pixel art but it's an amazing drawing software overall so I was able to use all kinds of tricks. I'll put down some details, it'll also help me remember it better.
- I started with a rather rough scanned pencil sketch
- I applied some blur and a threshold filter to it to turn it into a kind of blobby 1-bit drawing (still about 1200*1200 size)
- The idea is that it's not necessary to think like traditional inking where you draw on top of a sketch. You can instead turn any kind of picture into "ink" and start shaping it with digital brushes and tools. (I have it set up so I can easily switch between drawing and erasing)
- When you do the whole drawing in 1-bit it's well suited for turning into vectors with a program like Inkscape. This is also a kind of advanced way to scale it down for pixeling. You can vectorize the drawing and render it out at the size you want. This smoothes out details that might cause clumps if you scale it down normally
The drawing part gave me the overall shape of the character but the detailing for this was all done with pixeling.
- First of all, process colors are useful. For this picture using pure black and white was part of the concept but for some time I used a medium gray instead of white to avoid burning my eyes unnecessarily. I've also thought about using various darkened colors for the drawing, that way you could tell different elements apart at the stage when they're still on different layers and such
- The dithering on the hair was laid out with a method similar to "index painting" but I spent a good amount of time editing it manually to make it look good. I also added a layer of white lines to keep it from mucking up the lineart
- In CSP you can turn any image into "material", they can be used for both brushes and screentones/patterns. Laying different patterns on top of each other will be a useful technique for 1-bit stuff...
- The background is made up of a distorted pattern in two layers (the noise is also created from the extreme distortion). As the character has a rather placid pose and expression I decided to have an energetic background for contrast. I took care to edit this also manually so it wouldn't look haphazard. The character has a thick white outline applied so as to not get confused with the background
- The text and other geometric elements are just old-fashioned pixel clicking. These were actually the most difficult single part since you can't really sketch them traditionally. So it's mostly just trial and error to make them look nice
All in all it was a rather complex process with many different stages and elements! It's good to save as a new file every now and then, that way I could see how it developed and take something from an earlier version if that was working better. This ended up being a rather epic comment... well, explaining things is fun
Dude! Dude. Dude!! I love it so much. Would love to hear about your process (as someone who loves making black and white ink drawings) - are you, like, index painting?
Thanks for the comments! I'm glad it's getting a good reception
Thank you! Working like this will be the best way for me to display my skills. This year is probably going to be interesting.
neat hatching! also great illustration, looking forward to see more!
B13N TR4B4J0!
Thank you!!