Question for people with Painterly styles

[alexwhite]

I have to say, i have an extremely painterly style, and I wanted to ask you guys, how do you create multiple sprites if your style is very skimp on linework? (in my case, i don't even have line work) should i just have multiple layers where i paint over things? just paint every sprite from scratch? (i don't want to do this btw)

[Auro-Cyanide]

I don't think it would be a very different process. Lineart is just guidelines anyway, and generally stylistic. Poses should work the same way where you have a base and then everything that changes is on different layers. Layers are extremely important with sprites, unless you want to be redrawing everything for every pose, every outfit and every emotion.

[DaFool]

I'm just a noob in art, but I've made art for several projects already. Not painterly, but the general structure is the same:

Layer order:

naked base pose1 -> clothes for pose1 -> naked base pose2 -> clothes for pose2

with the aim that you can copy part of the painting in naked base pose1 to use in naked base pose2, and clothes for pose1 to clothes for pose2. I've tried to minimize the layers via patching, but it became too cumbersome so after a while I just copy the entire layer set and edit accordingly.

[Zylinder]

I'm not sure if I qualify as having a painterly style, but in general, it's really the same I think. The only difference is you use colors to keep the shape of the drawing instead of lines.

If your characters have changes in clothes, it'll look like what DaFool said.

[Naked Layer] ---> [Clothes Layer]

If your characters just have one set of clothes and you need a change of expressions, it'll be

[Sprite layer] ---> [Extra face layer to change the eyes/mouth/brows]

And if you need both changes in clothes and expressions, that means you'll need a minimum of at least three layers. Clothes, Nakedbod, and a layer each for every expression. If you have multiple layers for the same outfit, you can always stack them in groups (In Photoshop, at least, but I think it's available for other programs too) to easily toggle the whole group on and off when you need to.