[GCompris-devel] Artwork Guidelines

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

On 07. feb. 2015 14:47, Timothée Giet wrote:
> Yes, and I just sent you an answer before noticing you cross-posted 
> here, so I paste my answer here too so people can follow what's been 
> said ;)

I think you forgot to use ‘Reply to all’, so the e-mail was only sent to 
me, but I’ll forward it, with my comments (inline).

> Hi Karl,
>
> Thanks a lot for your comments, you outline a few issues I agree with, 
> though I would address some differently.
>
> -External outlines: I still think that's possible to make things look 
> not flat and stand out of the background without external outlines, 
> though it requires very good shape and colors to work. Might be easier 
> and less risky to still use some form of outlines.
>
> I agree colored outlines would be the way to go then (same colour as 
> the inner object but slightly darker), but not as thick as in the dog 
> example (I don't feel that's looking cute personnaly).More subtle 
> outlines with more continuity would work better (for example the width 
> break on the top-right of the dog's head look bad), somewhere between 
> the chick and the dog examples.

I agree that the outlines are too thick in the dog example (and the 
colour is off, too). So somewhere between the chick and the dog would be 
nice.

> -Shadows:
> I must say this duck example is a very good example, in my opinion, of 
> "bad" drawing that needs shading to not look too bad. By "bad" I mean 
> the shapes are not synthesizing well the volumes. Compare this to any 
> hand drawn disney-style proper shape construction.. Those didn't need 
> shadows or even colors to look solid. This is what I want to target.

They did use outlines, though:

http://cdn.mos.totalfilm.com/images/l/lady.jpg
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111204221827/disney/images/0/02/Tramp2-disneyscreencaps.com-647.jpg

And some shading in the last example. The lack of shading may have 
something to do with having to draw 12 or 24 frames per second of the 
movies, though. :) It also help that they had extremely detailed, lush, 
hand-painted backgrounds to put the characters on. If the backgrounds 
looked similar to the foreground (simple shapes with solid colours), it 
wouldn’t have worked well at all.

More recent (hand-drawn) Disney movies seems to use some more, but still 
subtle, shading:

http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/35200000/Walt-Disney-Screencaps-Prince-Aladdin-walt-disney-characters-35286754-5000-2721.jpg

So I agree that you don’t need *gradients* to achieve depth. Gradients 
easily look terrible:

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/polls/1111000/1111053_1346481149909_full.png
http://images.wikia.com/disney/images/archive/0/02/20111112212435!6976_Pluto_Dog_Standup_743.jpg

But subtle shading and outlines are very effective. Here’s an example (I 
don’t really like this image, but it serves as an illustration of the 
both outlines, shading and shadows).

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111029010913/disney/images/8/89/Lady-And-The-Tramp-Wallpaper-classic-disney-7326007-1024-768.jpg

> Also about good shapes, staging is another important point to get it 
> right. Thanks for pointing at this (I knew the concept, but wasn't 
> sure of the english name).
>
> -Colors: Yes only purely pastel colors would lack contrast, that's why 
> I added "or at least not too saturated colors".
> You can notice the wip examples don't have purely pastel colors.
> On the first of your Ok examples ( 
> https://lh6.ggpht.com/5KGEpRh-1H_24E5DZO8NHT5047WSMOZJFGl7nQSz--m07VA15VhlMwaUXmrT2hKJVB4=h900 
> ) , the background saturation is very close to what I want to target, 
> but the characters still look too flashy (they can be a bit more 
> saturated than background but not that much)
>
> I'll meditate a bit on all this and make an update of the guidelines 
> page soon.
>
> Thanks again,
> Cheers
>
> Timothée