Rena Wire

About this project

# Up on the powerline, Renamon sits ever vigilant, watching for any sign of a Digimon emerging in the real world. She is ready to pounce. She notices everything… except for all the people staring up from below.

Pose based on

Created by: MysticalPP

# For this picture I wanted to try using deeper shading with more detailed shadows, instead of just slapping on a simple anime shadow at the end. The idea was inspired by some of the sprite-work that RockTheBull made.

# I ended up shading this picture three times.

# The first time I did the shading in Photoshop and used PixeLover to reduce the colors and automate the dithering the same way I did with one of my Sally pictures , with some slight hand-adjustment afterwards.

# But then I decided I didn’t like how haphazard the dithering was with the pixels and shaded it again the way I normally do with anime shadows. When I compared them at the end, the PixelOver version actually didn’t look half bad at small sizes. I think the main reason why is because I’m just better at shading things in Photoshop. But it wasn’t perfect.

Dithered with PixeLover

# But then I had an idea! I could use a layer threshold in Photoshop to apply a dither pattern to a specific shade of brightness. This would let me see the dithering in real-time while I’m shading. The result was much better, and I didn’t need to export a bunch of pictures into PixelLover so it was also less effort.