This needs an artist's touch - my shading is terrible.

[Gear]

It's been a while since I've talked about my game's art, but I think I need to work on my shading a bit.

If you've been around a while and have talked to me, you may know that my project has an unusual art style. Because of my desire for a more Western art style, coupled with my refusal to do the face transplanting thing with sprites, I pretty much gave up on finding a sprite artist a long time ago. The result is a tracing method. I take about fifty photos of friends of mine in various poses, and load them into Photoshop. I use a brush to trace all their outlines, then discard the original photo. I then color each section a single (typically) color, each on a separate layer. Then I shade with one darker color to create what people have been calling a cel-shaded style, similar to (though not nearly as stylized as) what is seen in The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker.

Now, I'm not asking for someone to tell me that I shouldn't cel-shade or that I shouldn't trace, or whatever. I like the style, actually, and I intend to stick with it. My bigger concern is that I don't think I'm shading them properly in terms of where the light is supposed to fall. I've tried reference photos, I've tried using DAZ 3D, and a myriad of other techniques, but ultimately, I have trouble translating them. I think the issue stems from the fact that in real life, shading is very soft. Trying to translate soft shading into hard-lined, monochromatic shading is like trying to translate Dutch into American Sign Language while wearing mittens. What I'm looking for is a bit of advice on where I've gone wrong on the sprites this far (shading primarily, but if you see issues in the outlines, let me know that, too), and how you think I should best fix them. I want to take all the answers into account, and draw a conclusion from them in order to improve the style.

Based on what I've written so far, I think you can tell that I am not proficient in visual art. My real talent lies in writing, but when you're working on almost no budget, you learn to take on a lot of roles and manage them somewhat creatively. Anyway, here are the sprites in question.

Before you ask, let me answer two questions:

1) No, that is not all the sprites. The males have between ten and thirty sprites so far, depending which character.
2) I only have three sprites of the girl (Raven) up there because they're the only three I'm willing to show now. Apparently my lack of art skill gets even worse when drawing women. EVEN IF I'M TRACING THEM. So yeah, that's all I have that's remotely presentable. If you have advice on how to make her look more feminine (without ridiculous hypersexualized posing techniques), I'm all ears.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what you talented folks have to say, because honestly, I'm at a loss.

[Taleweaver]

This is about Gear's art alone and thus belongs to Personal Art Threads.

Moving.

[Coren]

At a quick glance they all seem pretty decent for cell-shading except for the last sprite of the man in purple. The quick purple shading lines on his shirt actually give me goosebumps because they're just so out of place. I think you should remove them.

[myapple]

I went a bit overboard but uhhh building on what Kirroha said...
I don't think there's anything really wrong with the actual placement itself in your shading, it's more just the... unrefined quality to it? (Though I can't say that i'm a fan of the light source being rather severely from the left side... but that's just a personal thing)

Do take what I say with a grain of salt. I have a very different style from what you're going for in this VN, so my views might not be quite what you're looking for.

One of the qualities that I feel makes shading look softer in real life (and one of the things that is important when you translate real shadows to cel shading) is that the edges of things have to taper. When cel shading, shadows for organic objects like clothing or body parts rarely (if ever) end in a flat edge. This is especially crucial when it comes to cel shading hair, because it is incredibly easy to make hair very blobby. The 4th sprite for the last dude has awesome hair!

The middle example is what i've done with your existing shading (with just a few more lines added in here and there). This is probably the basic of what I would do for shading.

BUT

If you do have the urge to go for something even a little more... well, you can add in some reflective light (such as in the third example). For the sake of sticking as closely to your original style as possible, I just used the base colour of the clothing (though you can be really fancy with reflective light colours if you want to).

Now with the tapering, I do realize that you're most likely using a mouse. But it's not that hard to do; you either just have to erase the edges of your lines, or you can use the lasso tool. Excuse me for linking, but it's probably easier than trying to explain in words; http://caydett.deviantart.com/art/Cel-S ... -270935090 (the lasso method is at the bottom).

As for making your girls more feminine... well that's a bit of a tough question. Because you're using a tracing method, I would say maybe try and retake some of the pose photographs with better posture and/or different clothing. I don't think she looks too bad though?
I do see that you did a bit more tapering on her (I guess she's a more recent one?) It does look better than the blunt lines, but keep in mind where clothing creases and how shadows fall. (This http://solfieri.deviantart.com/art/Clot ... -194453484 might be useful to skim through)

I did do a little take on trying to make her more feminine though; slightly more narrow shoulders and waist, larger hips, smaller nose and a more rounded face (also her lip colour... because paler lips is generally not a thing that most people want to go for I don't think...). Again, I have no idea if this is what you were going for, but it might help.

Lastly, this may or may not be me nitpicking, but the use of the gradients on some of the objects is distracting. IMO if you're going with cel shading, you should stick with cel shading. If you want to mix in gradients, you should do it on the people as well; as it is, the elements of the cel shading and the gradients don't fit together.
Something like:

But again, it might just be me.

[Gear]

At a quick glance they all seem pretty decent for cell-shading except for the last sprite of the man in purple. The quick purple shading lines on his shirt actually give me goosebumps because they're just so out of place. I think you should remove them.

Yeah, I wasn't sure about them when I initially did that, but you're right, they do look pretty terrible. Never got the hang of shading clothing.

@myapple: Wow! That is a lot of information, but your renditions of the sprites look a lot better. Like I just said, shading clothing is NOT a strength of mine, but working on tapering like you said will probably add a lot more quality to these sprites.

The reflective light has potential, I'll admit, but it does look odd in my two-color system (not to mention, I don't really understand how it would work), so I may just play with it a bit, but skip if it doesn't work. Do you have any insight as to what kinds of colors to use for reflective light? It's not something I'd particularly noticed when I was being creepy at college and staring people down looking for places to shade.

I think I'm backing myself into a corner a bit. On one hand, I want my girl to look more feminine, but at the same time, she's kinda uber tomboyish, and doesn't wear makeup (though I may change this a bit, just because it looks so much better). The original model I took photos of has the wider shoulders and narrower hips (she looks great, don't get me wrong, but I think it's the unusual combination of African+Japanese DNA that gives her a unique shape and her skin-and-bones appearance), so it's usually a challenge to modify someone's body after tracing to begin with. It doesn't make it any easier that I'm a lot better at drawing guys than girls.

And thank you for making mention of the sketch pad, necklace, etc. You're right, now that I really look at it, the cel-shade mixed with the gradients is rather jarring. I'll have to work on that one, and figuring out how clothes fold, because that, again, is something I don't really know. (With everything I don't know how to do, I will never take art skills for granted the way I do my writing skills, I swear...)

Thank you so much for your insight and help. I marked a question in blue above in case this became a bit TL;DR issue, but other than that, you've helped me out immensely.

[myapple]

You might want to try looking through http://tamberella.deviantart.com/art/Gi ... -251104611 and http://toerning.deviantart.com/art/Blue ... -278627422 and as for how reflective light works http://www.paulcarneyarts.com/images/sh ... hading.jpg (i'm not sure if that was what you were asking, but it helps to look at anyway)

buuut

As for what colours to use, well in sprites the choices aren't too hard, I don't think. Because they're overlayed on a bunch of different backgrounds, picking any specific colours can be hard, so it's usually easiest to go with a more muted shade of grey-blue or lavender; nothing too intense. These hues will give the image more of the illusion that it is in some sort of atmosphere, without being intrusive.
With CGs on the other hand, picking a colour from the background/surrounding objects is the best way to go. For example, http://aquasixio.deviantart.com/art/Lik ... -295289639 though it is more on the exaggerated side; there is blue lighting and highlighting from the window, as well as the oranges from the flame.
For a more... ambient sort of example, http://cookiehana.deviantart.com/art/Lo ... -365738172 or http://frozenlilacs.deviantart.com/art/ ... -211405608 though the second example is done using a simple airbrush of some colour, rather than anything complicated.

For your sprites, you could do something like;

but I would say just experiment and see what you like?
hopefully this helps >_<

[Gear]

That's a good point you bring up; unlike most VNs, my setting generally doesn't change much, so I could use the environment to determine the reflected light color. XP

Thanks for helping me! Art stuff that seems so common-sense to artists really flies right over my head. I appreciate you taking the time out!