Misty And Charizard Sprite

About this project

# Another day, another nagging need to accomplish something. I had an itch to make another sprite and then I found this really interesting tutorial about creating a real-time preview of a sprite while you’re drawing it in Photoshop and I wanted to try the technique.

# But… what to draw? Then I remembered one of my favorite pictures drawn by Roary.

Inspiration

Created by: Roary

# Of course, I don’t feel right just copying a picture. I like to make changes and put my own spin on it. I usually at least change the characters and adjust the poses. Now… which characters would work in this situation? There’s a big size difference. I decided to go with Misty and Charizard.

# Time to break out the drawing tablet.

# I managed to trace the composite reference for Charizard. The lines were a bit wobbly but when it’s zoomed out to the intended sprite size those small imperfections won’t be noticeable, and I can always adjust it later when I make the sprite.

# But this really cramped up my hand, and the line thickness was inconsistent. But then I remembered something that is extremely good at consistent line thickness. Paint Tool Sai and its legendary “curve” tool. I had tried this program years ago when I was making art for my Guardia Forest Remake game. The Curve tool is amazingly intuitive to use but it tends to make vector lines with a consistent thickness that looks weirdly artificial in normal artwork.

# But for this particular project I wanted consistent lines! Because they would shrink down to a fairly clean outline for the sprite art. And after doing Charizard I knew how thick I needed the lines to be.

# I can probably work with this. Now to use these pictures as guides to draw the actual sprite outlines. After that the sprite-making process ended up being mostly the same as usual for me. I was able to mostly trace the lines that the vectors gave me with only minor adjustments to their shapes, instead of using my usual “pixel counting” technique. After all I suspect that the sprite-making process tends to go faster and smoother if I save all the anti-aliasing for last.

# That said, this is a freakin’ gigantic sprite! It took about a day to just to get the raw outlines and flat colors filled. The only reason I went this large was so that you can see the expression on Misty’s face. Everything revolves around that.

# Before I start adding any real details let’s figure out where the light and shadow planes should be in general. What’s facing toward the light and what is facing away?

# Actually… come to think of it, wouldn’t Charizard’s flaming tail give off a lot of light? Let’s just make that the light source.

# That’s… huff… ONE shadow color down. Now to go over everything and add one more… or maybe two.

# Two… two layers of shadows done! Maybe I should just call it done here…

# Nope, not yet. I still need to give Misty a shadow and make Charizard’s balls overlap Misty’s foot to show that she’s climbing on it.

# The tail also needs to be on fire. I didn’t bother trying to trace something like that. Instead I just kind of improvised the flame with multiple layers, each with a different color. Going brighter and brighter. It turned out the key to making this look good mostly boiled down to 2 things.

Brighter colors should generally go below darker colors, to make the flame “rise”
The bright colors need to be surrounded by slightly darker colors, to make them “glow”

# This COULD be considered done, but… I can’t help myself. I gotta anti-alias all the things! It’s an addiction. It’s also my favorite part of making sprites. Nothing too fancy. Just slightly lighten the outlines where they meet the inside of their shape, and slightly darken a pixel in the shapes where they meet the outline.

# Also, I think I figured out the trick to adding colors to the outlines without making them look “broken.” Just make sure both colors in the outline are much darker than the shape they’re outlining. If you look at the finished picture against a bright background the outline looks like a solid color. But against a dark background the edges of the shape will look slightly smoother.