Wow look at that another poll - 3/29/23 (Patreon)

Ok, I'm gonna start at the beginning before I start this poll. Also, gonna be polling the lot of you instead of just Employees since I moreso want a general idea of what people think rather than an outright decision.

But the beginning!

So, after chatting with my friend about Paul in a traditional Japanese festival, I decided to draw this up. Originally I wasn't planning on coloring it, but it seemed... lacking without it. So, in the interest of mostly being lazy, I decided to color it in the messy paint-ey style I do for most of my backgrounds. It may not be perfect, but certain parts came out looking pretty good if you ask me!

A little while later, I decided to tease said friend with this crop of it.

Which made me noticed that, aside from some color outside the lines going on, the way it's shaded actually looks... really satisfying to my eyes. My friend agreed, and I had the thought- what would a sprite look like if shaded in this style?

Curious, I then streamed me shading Eiji's resprite in this style to my friend. After- and I kid you not- no more than a couple of minutes, I sat back and looked at it.

I'm not the only one that thinks that looks really freaking cool, right?? Doesn't that look awesome??

i chose Eiji because his flats had been done, but not his normal shading. Emboldened by this success, I decided to try my hand at applying this shading to a sprite that already has shading, allowing me to compare the two. Obviously, I chose Paul.

Though I felt this looked pretty good, it occurred to me as I was writing this post that something actually was off, separate from the Eiji above. Thus, I decided to amend the comparison image to the one below:

The big difference is that I've removed the colored lines from his lineart, mixing that paint-ey style with bold lines instead. Honestly, I find that this looks better myself! There are a couple of things I would adjust about Paul here, were I to take this approach in the future- for instance, I would lighten some of his edges and darken others (similar to the cel shading on the left Paul, without doing the actual cel shading).

Something really interesting about this method is that, while it's fun, it's also really damn easy (and fast) in comparison to the traditional method I use. It also applies an interesting, almost story-book texture to the sprites that would be very interesting to see, and is easy enough where integrating it into the art as a whole wouldn't actually be that difficult (and from my testing, would actually wind up being easier on me later).

But all that said, I should give you a...

tl;dr-

Cool painterly style looks neat and is easy. How do y'all like it?

If you could answer this as honestly as possible, without even thinking about whatever workload concerns you might have (don't be concerned, it really would not be as big an issue as you might assume), that would be awesome o7