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Today I decided to try an experiment. Can I manually enlarge a small sprite?
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At first, I started with my usual approach of outlining the shapes…
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… But then I stopped myself. If I have more space to work with, then I need to more detail to fill it. The original sprite isn’t going to have that detail, because it has been simplified to fit its smaller size. Basically… don’t do this.
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So let’s add those details. First I’ll figure out where the major anatomy of her body is located. And then I’ll sketch a new pose on top of it.
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Now I’ll just turn that into a sprite… somehow. Come to think of it, I remember a website that was experimenting with real-time preview techniques for sprite drawing.
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But while messing around with the “posturize” effect, I had a happy accident. I cranked the curve contrast way too high and ended up with a pure black and white image… with nice clean edges!
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Edges that will be much easier to outline in Aseprite.
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From here it’s just a normal sprite.
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An interesting experiment, but some mistakes were made. I had intended to just double the size of the original sprite, but I temporarily used a larger size while drawing the sketch and completely forgot about it, resulting in 4x the original size. In other words, 16 times the amount of detail. Each pixel was replaced with 16 pixels.
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… and also 16 times more likely to make anatomical mistakes. That hand is looking pretty funky. I should have looked at some photo reference for that.
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That head is also looking too big. I can partly blame Akira Toriyama’s official artwork for this. But I think I’m also running into the limits of Chrono Trigger’s 3-head-tall body proportions.
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Well they can’t all be good. You gotta expect that sometimes.
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I knew this was going to be an interesting experiment, so I recorded a time-lapse video… where I spend way too long getting the magnifier to behave. Something I didn’t end up needing.
