A new graphic style!

LudumDares have been to me a journey to learn graphics. I’m a developer but the challenge I chose here is getting good at graphics. I started with the simplest character ever on LudumDare38: Spermicorn: it was all wobbly lines. Then it came Zoltan with that zillion of cats animations that kept me very busy.

Now I wanted to move past black outines and try something different. Most of all, I wanted to acheive a more uniform look in my graphics.

It’s basically this:

I ditched the outlines and try a different style: ‘trace it freehand with the lasso tool and fill it ’

Need some shadow? Select again the area with the freehand tool and change lightness, or add a black layer in multiply. This is of course the quick dirty way to acheive it, we are talking of producing a lot of graphics in a short time.

you and the pen

Give it a try if you didn’t before. All you need is a good relationship with your pen. (That is acheivable with some boring exercises like tracing a lot of horizontal and vertical lines, or simply by drawing more with it) I say it every time: even a cheap tool will do the job, it’s just a matter of practice.

So here is how to draw Mr Raccoon from scratch:

I took a reference, because I don’t know by heart how raccoons look. I started with the face shape (I made it large and cartoonish) Then I outlined the dark parts And then the white ones.

Keep everything on separate layers and you’ll have no problems if you make mistakes here.

Then I added the main features. These will stay always on different layers because they need to be changed in order to get the different expressions.

shadows

Now, to give everything some more depth, let’s add the shadows. I usually draw them with black on a different layer and I switch the blending mode to multiply. Then you can adjust the opacity to get the colour you need. But if you need to go faster and are not afraid to make mistakes, you can just select the area you want and change it’s lightness or fill it with a darker colour.

done!

Here we are. That might not be perfect but it was quick. This counts during a jam but also when you are making the game of your life but it needs so many assets that it will take you a year making them all alone. I’ve been there:)

Hope this will help you to improve your games look.

I’d love to hear your tricks and the graphic solutions you found to improve your art in spite of the short time available!