Ex 1: Headspace Portrait

An example guide of recreating Basil's Headspace portrait.

Intro

For this we'll be attempting to recreate Basil's portrait as close to the original as possible.

This example is done in Clip Studio Paint. Though this is also possible on Krita and Photoshop as they support all features required.

Original Basil Portrait

Layout

Here is a quick rundown on general step layout.

Layer layout in Clip Studio Paint

Line Art

For this example, the image is drawn at 512x512, far larger than game sprite of 106x106. This is so the specific brush detail will be "averaged out" later when sized smaller, and allow for more leeway of wobbliness.

Line width is estimated by just sizing the original to also 512x512 and comparing line brush.

Since the goal here is just to recreate for demonstration, the line art will be traced over.

Basil portrait line art recreation

Brush and Texture

Brush used in example is Pencil R on Clip Studio. At around 6px size.

Texture used is Impasto, a default texture on Clip Studio. Resized slightly smaller at 8% opacity.

Line Coloring

For coloring, tone curve will be used as it's simple but still gives enough control over specific values.

Taking a look at original sprite, notice that the darkest value remains black, changing to blue. With the lighter area being more purple/magenta.

Basil with headspace coloring

Tone Curve Settings

Tone curve here is done in Clip Studio Paint. Here are settings used.

More info can be found here on Tonal Correction Effects.

RGB

RGB Channel can be thought of in this case as brightness value. Being 0 = Black to 255 = White.

For this, dark value is made darker to make the black values pop through the other colors and help increase contrast. This is shown as curve pushed down on left to middle.

The bright value is made slightly brighter to increase contrast and reduce the back texture of the paper a little. Not too much, as paper texture is still wanted. This is shown as curved pushed up a little on right side.

Red

In this case, the red curve is pushed down on the left, making darker value more cyan, with it being opposite of red on light color wheel.

Red Channel

Blue

The blue channel is heavily pushed up to give a strong blue color on line art. The point still pass at 0,0 as we still want dark black values to be retained.

Blue Channel

Green

In this case, the green curve is pushed down on the left, making darker value more magenta, with it being opposite of red on light color wheel.

The push happens more on the right side, being lighter values. This is done as we have already established that we want lighter color like the skin to be magenta colored.

Green Channel

Cropping

This can be done quickly with masking at the end product, magic wand or fill tool with transparent value both works.

Basil now cropped

Layout shown. The masking layer is done on the folder for ease.

Sometimes there may be issue with selection fill, it may be good idea to increase contrast or remove the texture layer temporarily first.

If done grouped in a folder, make sure it is set to Normal blending mode.

Chromatic Aberration (Optional)

Curiously, in Basil's portrait sprite and some other headspace sprites there seems to be slight amount of chromatic aberration. In this case can be seen by slight magenta shade above lines and cyan shade below.

Chromatic aberration gives the sprite a slight more pop with more color variance, though might be annoying to work with.

Zoomed in original sprite, notice the cyan below lines and magenta above

Chromatic aberration can be quite differing in method in different art program, so it may be better to research about it in your own program case rather than explained here.

In this example, the red channel is offset by 2 pixels upward.

Chromatic Aberration applied, 2 pixels vertical difference in red and blue channel

Resizing

Now that the sprite is done, it is time to resize back to the game file size of 106x106. The interpolation method used here is average colors to give it a smooth look and accurate coloring.

Sprite now resized to 106x106

From this point on it might be good idea to do the steps in mass after making multiple sprites already, to avoid taking time to individually resize everytime.

Sharpen

Take a look at original sprite, you may notice how portraits tends to have strange white border around the lines. This is a result from sharpen effect.

Sharpen is used to make the image less blurry making lines more defined. In this case the "blur" is due to resizing.

Unsharp tool applied on image

Final Result

And it is finished! Here are comparison between original (left) and recreation (right).

Original

Recreation

[Tip] Separating Head and Face

To save time on making multiple face, a faceless head template could be made, and have the face variants be added on top later.

Older Omori sprites are all redrawn entirely for every frame, but for more newer sprites, like Basil's battle portraits for console content, the face are split.

Basil's sprite in Nucleus Art Gallery