Lemma Soft Forums

I am making a fangame based off of a game that used these character images.

http://imgur.com/a/37Iqz

Does anyone know what kind of image techniques/effects are likely used to construct images like this? And does anyone know of any software that can allow me to make more characters like this (where their head is angled in a certain direction), at least similar enough that my own characters would blend into the one from this game's?

It looks like these images were rendered digitally in probably Photoshop? Meaning they were drawn from scratch, basically. There's no special software to make stylistic human faces like this, they were just drawn and then painted digitally, probably with a lot of layers and consideration to lighting. There's no way to pinpoint the exact technique from just small head sprites, but I'd gather they were drawn in a large resolution before being scaled down.

To draw those, you can use any kind of digital drawing software... to make arts like that, it's more to artist skill rather than the software. You can use photoshop, GIMP, SAI, Clip Studio, Medibang... anything...
If you want to use those pictures in your game and you need to edit them, you will need graphic editor software, like photoshop (or GIMP if you prefer free software).

I think technique-wise, the images heavily used photo reference. Either the artist looked at a model/image reference as they drew, or they imported the photos into the art program they used and traced parts of it (which is perfectly fine to do if you use your own photos, royalty-free ones, or photos used with the owner's permission).

Then the lineart was digitally painted-over using a painterly technique (the brushstrokes were slightly transparent, layer upon layer, and were done with a custom brush that has a traditional brush-like appearance).

The shadows/darker shades of colour were then blended together using a soft Smooth Tool.

Highlights were added to areas like the hair, eyes, skin, and other reflective areas.

Basically, a lot of to-life reference, and traditional painting techniques were possibly used to make the images.