Samus - In Another World - CDS - Front (Patreon)

Another character design shot, this time from the front.

Art Talk
Whenever I finish up a picture, I have several standard methods I use to give the art a bit more pop. Since this is a cel-style work, there's a lot of flat color that can get monotonous. Gradients, smudges, and little airbrush blasts can break up the monotony and really polish the otherwise flat tones. This is all standard stuff, done forever by animators and digital artist. Then there's the digital/optical technique where you duplicate the image, noise it, blur it, and then superimpose it over the original art using a layer composition method like Hard Light. The effect is that it both softens the image, while intensifying the saturation and contrast. Adjust the opacity of this effect and it creates a nice glow on the finished art. Again, nearly everyone in the know does some version of this as a finishing effect. Personally, I call this layer the varnish, after the painterly technique that produces similar results.

For this pic I tried selecting around the character, feathering by a couple pixels, and then clearing that part of the layer several times to soften the edge. Finally, I ran the Smart Sharpen filter over the flattened art and played with the settings to the point where all the edges of every color division had an over-defined glowing quality. I'd call it slightly overbaked. It reminded me very much of old cel-art illustrations by the likes of Satoshi Urushihara and Koh Kawarajima. Makes me wonder if an overzealous sharpening setting on a scanner didn't contribute in a small way to the magic of their works.

I definitely like the look, and I'll experiment with it more in further images.

Okay a couple of more turns to finish and then I'll share the plugsuit design and proceed to the illustration(s).

-Ecchi