Alright, now that
we know some general face proportions, lets use that to make
something practical. It is time to make the all elusive status
portrait (or menu mug shot, or basically any facial portrait
you wish to create). This is not an easy thing to learn through
any tutorial, as it does involve a lot of practice and experience.
So don't be discouraged it takes a little practice to start
producing a mug shot with which you are happy. I have also found
that oil painting portraits of models, friends or your little
sibling (basically anyone you can get to sit still for you)
provides invaluable insight. Status portraits come in all shapes
and sizes, but we are going to stick to frame sizes of about
32x32 pixels in our examples. In case you are sitting there
wondering what a status portrait is, here are some examples
taken from published games.
We can see here
that none of these characters have a perfectly realistic portrayal
of a human face. The skin tones, hair and eye colors, etc.,
that are used are interpretive and unique to each portrait.
This means that as an artist, you do not have to match a perfect
skin tone or a perfectly realistic hair color in order to create
a realistic looking character portrait. Also notice how some
of them have a slightly anime feel to them (especially Crono,
who was drawn by the maker of DragonBall Z if it wasn't terribly
obvious). All of these variations of the human face are perfectly
acceptable, and some of them are quite exquisite considering
the color depth used. For those of you that are curious, every
face portrait shown above with the exception of Flik (the largest
picture, with the guy wearing the blue bandana) have only 16
unique colors or less. Quite amazing, huh? I'm going to assume
that your pictures do not need to be limited to only 16 colors,
but for those of you who might be working with Game Boy Advanced
development art, you are just going to have to pick your colors
wisely. It takes a great amount of color knowledge in order
to achieve the expertise to make picture perfect portraits (say
that 5 times fast! Hehe.). Also, notice the repetition of color
in the sprites above. All the portraits from Final Fantasy tactics
only have 2 or 3 skin tones. making eye color match with clothing
or hair color is a big help, and if you can get away with using
a highlight color for the whites of the eyes then go for it!
You don't want to waste a palette color solely for the iris
or eye whites or an earring or some other tiny feature/accessory.
Well I suppose it is time for us to jump right in. Starting
off your portrait picture with amazing detail is almost an impossible
feat to accomplish. Start out basic. When you are painting a
portrait with traditional oil paint, what you are basically
doing is forming the face and hair with color. Don't jump into
creating eye highlights or eyes or any facial feature whatsoever.
If you don't have a general face blocked out you are going to
have no idea what your final picture is going to look like.
If you are drawing on paper and hope to scan your picture in,
this applies to you as well. I will admit that drawing a face
with a tablet is a lot easier and less painstaking than clicking
pixels with a mouse, but its not impossible. In fact, it's not
even hard! It just takes a lot of patience. I will be making
a character portrait along with you, so I will show you what
I have blocked out so far. Notice that I will be making TWO
portraits at once, just to illustrate the different progression.
Also, the picture on the right will be done strictly in 4 bit
color depth (16 colors).
Wow, they dont
look like much of anything do they? You're right, they dont.
Notice there are no details whatsoever. Hell, the only color
i even bothered to fill in was the hair of the character on
the right! Look at the structure of these sketches however.
They already have formed faces, with some guidelines to help
placement of facial features. They also have basic hair shape,
which is key in helping to form the face. Some of the shoulder
and chest features are illustrated so that the heads do not
look like they were freshly severed by the headless horseman.
It is important that your preliminary layouts have structure.
Notice how none of the portraits have a direct, full-on, face
forward view to them. They are slightly angled, looking either
up or down. This is what gives a portrait character and emotion.
The character on the left side has a slightly confident, or
possibly stern look on his face depending on his facial expression;
but you can conclude that he is not going to have a sappy depressed
expression based on his poise. However, the face on the right
could be either expressing sadness or extreme anger depending
on the positioning of the eyebrows, and how wide his eyes are
open, etc. Just to clear up any uncertainties, we are going
to make the figure on the left slightly stern looking, and the
face on the right somewhat angry looking. Okay, now that we
have some facial structures set up, it is time to start adding
some detail. Just remember some of the proportional relations
that were established on the previous page of this tutorial!
Make as many guidelines as you need, because this is the phase
of the drawing that usually makes or breaks a facial portrait.
I went ahead and filled in some of the generic features of both
characters, so let us see what they are looking like.
Now the one on
the left is starting to shape up. I took the liberty to define
several shades of the skin tone, hair color, and outfit color.
One thing that is tricky about skin tone, if you define the
shades that represent the skin to have a large gap in the gradient,
then there is going to be too much contrast between the skin
tones, thus eliminating that 'smooth' effect that you need to
represent skin. Almost always blend skin gradually; try not
to jump from the first shade of peach to the third shade of
peach. And if you do, try to put at least one pixel of the second
shade of peach in between the first and third shade. It makes
a large difference to your eyes. On both figures, the basic
facial features and overall facial expression is established.
Once you are over this hump, it is time to start having fun
with your portrait. Lets start throwing some accessories on
your character to make them a little unique. The figure on the
left needs an outfit all together, so let's go ahead and fill
them in.
Alright, now we
are really cooking here. Looking at the character on the left,
I added some more detail to the hair, and gave him a bandana.
I also worked in his eyes and adjusted his eye brows so that
they didn't look so huge like they did in the previous example.
There's also little 'buttons' that I put on his outfit. The
character on the right has undergone severe development, his
chin was raised a bit because I felt his face was a bit too
long. Also his hair got a little bigger and I added a center
part to it. I also gave him some sort of blue coat that I thought
would look cool on him, and made his eye color match that of
the coat. Note that as of now, the portrait on the left uses
about 25 colors and the portrait on the right uses about 15
or so. Actually his eyes are green but in order to save color
space we will convert them to blue. At this stage you can make
color changes, add a little more detail to the costume, features,
and any other subtle changes you wish to make. Let's take a
look at how our characters turned out.
Just to go over
some of the edits I have made, I changed the color scheme of
the character on the left completely. However it is important
to note that I did not change the number of shades of color
that I used in the face and costume. However, I did blend his
hair a little with the smudge tool in order to make it look
a little smoother. I added highlights in the hair on the right
hand character, and used that same hair color in order to give
him some stitch lining on his coat. Now you probably read through
this page in a matter of minutes, when in reality it took hours
of fiddling around with pixels to make the portraits. No one
ever said that they aren't tedious to make. Just take it step
by step and make the appropriate adjustments as you see them.
Now lets sit back, and see how they can blend in with the rest
of them!
