So for @enchantingmirage (and anyone down to watch me unpack all my art school notes in a chaotic pile), here's an art tech ramble about the TS artstyle :3
(For the record I'll be focused on just the covers for this ramble, makes things easier to ramble about tbh)
Okay so I'ma start with color since that's the first thing people peep at when they do something like this. Color theoryyyy yippeeeee
So in color theory there are three values to focus on: hue (the thing people learn about when learning the colors of the rainbow), saturation (how much of the color something has-- the less saturated, the less color it has and the closer it is to being monochrome), and value... is the first thing I'm gonna demonstrate :D
So value is basically where the colors lie on the black-and-white spectrum, and as you can see here with Dancing Shadows, the values are light near the center with the girls, but it's balanced out by the darker values near the edges. I'd even dare say the girls' own bodies and outfits balance out each others' values-- their fur and hair is at least a little darker than their outfits, allowing their outfits to pop more, while also balancing the light values with something darker so it's not overwhelming.
This sense of balance is very much important and is very much key to a good rendered piece and how a new viewer will perceive it. We as humans always base our judgment on something else, even when that something else is in the piece itself; so a skilled artist will know how to use that to their advantage and direct the viewer's gaze through a piece as they may intend it. Which is getting into composition territory but that's a discussion for later. What I'm getting at is that the balance of light and dark help accentuate what the artist wanted to be highlighted in this piece, and helps the darks feel dark and the lights feel light.
For comparison, here is the new Fireflowers cover in monochrome.
And I don't even know where to start talking about this one, which is a problem with the piece :D
All the colors are so vibrant when you look at them on the raw picture, but when seen like this, where the values are the only thing to focus on, they're all more or less the same in terms of value. As the site I used to edit this only offered a little thumbnail preview of the edited version, I was only able to look at it in full when I put it here.
And my first thought was it all looks the same. It's all the same-ish shade of grey, and even the dark hues of Violet and Paulina's hair is either overshadowed by highlights that nerf its darkness, or it's just so small or shoved into the back that it's not even noticeable. I guess the darkness of the sky above does something, but it just leads you to the title text, and it itself isn't enough to balance out just how bright everything beneath it is. It kinda just leads you to the title text, and when you ask it how to process everything beneath the title text, it just says "good luck" and retreats to its cubby hole at the very top of the cover.
EVEN THE VOLCANO LOOKS BRIGHT EVEN THOUGH IT'S IN THE BACKGROUND WHAT IS THIS
The thing this cover is lacking is a sense of contrast. The reason why Dancing Shadows looks fine while the new Fireflowers doesn't is because of the contrast one has and the other doesn't. Dancing Shadows has enough shadows and darker values to make the lights pop more, while new Fireflowers just has grey grey grey grey, making it really hard to pick something to look at without it feeling weird or unnatural. I'm stuck between trying to get Violet's ukulele out of my face, or having to reconcile the fact that the first thing I thought of when I saw that volcano was a nuclear power plant.
The other side effect of it is, all the colors are so bright, that nothing stands out! Even the fire, which is so small it looks like Nicky spent too much time staring at pookie to maintain it, but also it doesn't look bright at all-- it's just about the same shade of grey as Pam next to it or the ocean behind it.
Now that's values, let's move on toooo the main meat of color theory: mushing colors together.
Now the most beginners will probably know is warm and cool colors tend to go well with fellow warm or cool colors, and then occasionally a movie poster will blindside everyone by making two clashing colors mix together perfectly (see the Marvel Infinity War and Endgame's obsession with blue-purple mix with orange, and the Wicked movie posters). Why do they work together? Well, that's a complicated question that can be simplified on a color wheel :D
We are gonna have to go a bit into detail about colors here because it is gonna add an extra layer to this. If you grew up on Barney and heard them sing the song about mixing colors, you're already halfway there-- when you mix red and yellow it makes orange, when you mix blue and yellow it makes green, when you mix the two you'll see a new color magically, when you mix red and blue it makes purple (🎵 nostalgia🎵). Red, yellow, and blue are the three primary colors you mix together to get orange, green and purple (the secondary colors); however, you can go further with this. If you adjust the ratios between the primary colors you're mixing (say, more yellow than red when making orange), you get tertiary colors (and a happy Crayola dandelion girl) :D
Now, that's colors. How does one mix them together without looking like barf? Buckle up because this is where things get technical.
The easiest way to get a color scheme is to just pick a color and go to the colors on either side of it on the wheel. This is an analogous color palette, it's the most common, Hollow Knight is obsessed with them if you need an example to look up; or if you're looking for an in-series example, Violet and Thea's regular outfit palettes involve analogous color schemes.
Another way is to grab the color on the opposite end of the color wheel and pair the colors up together. This is called a complementary or contrasting color scheme, and it's more difficult to use, but used right it can look really good. Colette, Nicky, Pam, and Paulina have complementary color schemes in their color palettes and they slay in them, and yes this is the reason why someone thought spamming red and green on Christmas was a good idea.
And there's every way you can fuck around with a triangle to make some triadic and even tetradic color schemes, and-- I'm not gonna lie I usually don't fuck with those because they're hard to pull off and they kinda scare me, so the tl;dr is there's a LOT that goes into picking colors and deciding what does and doesn't match, and even this demonstration I have for you isn't even the most complex this can go-- after all, we aren't taking values into account with this example.
ANYWAY, what I'm getting at is, by combining this section of color theory with values, you can make colors that look good together, but also make characters' color schemes portray their personality better through what colors they use (blah blah blah colors having a tendency to represent or invoke certain emotions in the viewer, even more so when put together in certain contexts).
Oh and uh I just realized I forgot to explain saturation a bit, uhhhhh slaps this here
This. The bolder the color is, the more saturated it is, and the paler it is, the less saturated it is.
As you can see here, there's a good chunk of variety with what the girls can do with their hues, values, and saturations to make colors fit together better. Especially with colors more separated on the color wheel, using this knowledge on hues, values, and saturations does help in making things not feel monotonous (figuring it out in a way that works for you does take practice tho).
For example, Paulina's dark teal (?) is less saturated than her orange, allowing the orange to pop and the teal to take a backseat supporting role. In contrast, Colette's colors are all relatively on the same values, but so they don't feel too out of place, the biggest details in blue are separated by a pale pink outline, as a sort of break to help the colors feel like they fit together better, and also give your brain a millisecond or so of break from all the same-y values.
Ooh and this is most prominent in Pam's kimono here, but one way to deal with a triadic is to play with the values and add variations and such. I believe there's a 60-30-10% rule with a character's color scheme in regards to the three colors you want to give them? A big main color, a second color for skin or something or other that doesn't occupy the majority of the palette, and then a third color used exclusively for little trinkets and highlights. Just throwing that one out there.
As for this? .... Eeeehhh?
Once again the girls are too bright, the seafloor's values are so bright they're detracting from the girls, the girls' values are too similar to the background boulders and cliffs and thus they're blending into them, and everything is saturated to high heaven with barely any respite from it, and I haven't even GOTTEN to how the little highlights in the girls' hair keeps jumping at you so aggressively o<-<
Even PAM looks way too saturated, what is this
Now as for this
This one is nice. I didn't really mention it before, but one way the old covers allow you to focus on the girls organically is to paint the background in a more rendered, soft, watercolor-y type of coloring; while the girls have more variations in value and are cel-shaded (think like every cartoon show or anime you've seen-- most of the time they're cel-shaded) that set them apart from the background and allow you to focus on them better. It also helps that the linework on the background is a dark blue (matching the blueness of the background in general), while the girls' lines are black, which allows the background to blend in and the girls' bright and bold colors and values stand out.
Alrighty I think that's enough of color theory, next part: composition and shapes :D
Okay so there are a lotta ways this can be done, but the gist is there are certain ways you can measure/arrange things in a picture to make it look aesthetically pleasing, and even guide the way other people look at the picture. You may not realize it, but looking at a picture is more than just the initial glance: your eyes move from one side of the picture to another, processing parts of the picture at a time to contribute to the first glance where you got to take in the picture as a whole all at once. And this is a subconscious thing most of the time, so there are ways you can gently usher the viewer's eyes to look at the picture a certain way, and to focus on certain focal points.
The most prominent way this effect is noticeable is through comics, where text and pictures have to be processed simultaneously instead of the block-of-text-with-picture-on-the-side in illustrated textbooks. Though it is a different genre of composition altogether, it still is the most obvious way you can see how arranging things can make you see things differently.
Here's a shot from a Marvel comic (Judgment Day), as an example: first one is the raw, and in the second I draw a line denoting the line your eyes trace when taking in the picture. Feel free to let me know if it's accurate, haha.
As you can see, the placement of the narration boxes and how the characters are positioned in the shot do affect how the page is seen by the reader, and there is so much to discuss alone in how you can set this up:
First you need a clear focal point(s), the thing(s) you want the viewer to look at the most. This will be the basis off which you'll base practically everything else in the shot. To use the previous covers I've shown as an example, Violet is the focal point of Dancing Shadows's cover, the volcano (?) is the focal point of Fireflowers's redesigned cover, the shipwreck is the focal point of the original Shipwreck cover)-- you get the picture, if you feel like one of the girls or a certain thing is popping off the most or is the most memorable part of the cover, it's most definitely the focal point.
Now that you have the focal point(s), you need a way to lead the viewer's eye towards it/them. Making it contrast with everything else (i.e. one red pencil in a case full of blue pencils), giving it the negative space to stand out in (one pencil sitting flat on an empty table), drawing attention to it via camera focus (pencil is closest to the camera and is most defined while everything in the background is blurred out), setting up the camera angle (looking up the pencil towards the lead from the butt end to make the pencil point point menacingly), or something to balance it out (putting an eraser next to the pencil so it's not lonely in the pencil case)-- many different ways to bring focus to the focal point :]
Now yes the stuff I said above is used to draw attention to the focal point, but that's the pretty obvious stuff. Time for the subtler stuff to make the aesthetic aesthetic-er :]]]
Leading lines is when you set up lines in the background that lead to a focal point. This shines especially in urban shots-- looking down a street lined with houses or cars (or anything, really), you can't help but look forward towards the end of the horizon in your peripherals is pointing-- and it's also the basis of 1, 2, and 3-point perspectives, as you literally draw everything using points in the canvas as a guide for where to draw your lines. Here's a picture of Times Square, and I can almost guarantee you that you were looking to the blank space near the center, or the skyscraper next to it because the posters and buildings on the sides and even the people were inadvertently leading and framing your gaze in that direction.
For a Thea Stilton example, Mystery in Paris's cover has Colette as the focal point, and the cover uses leading lines to draw your eyes towards her. Yes, the stage's 2-point perspective comes to a corner that's sitting right next to her, she is set up in the shot to be the center of attention-- the way she's at the very front and the tallest in the shot, the spotlights shining on her, even the girls' eyelines and waistlines point towards her!
Next up is rule of thirds, which is the one photographers and photography professors are obsessed with (sometimes excessively so), and the reason why every time you edit and crop a picture, there's a 3x3 grid that shows up as a guide. Generally speaking, it's been found that the most aesthetically pleasing/easy on the eyes way to set up a picture that's off-center is to have it such that the subjects are at about 1/3 away from the edge. Prince's Emerald here doesn't fully adhere to it (it's not a super-strict rule), but as you can see, Nicky, the elephant, Paulina and the monkey's emerald, even the building in the background are spaced out to fit the 1/3s lines rather well and Paulina's hand and braid and the elephant's trunk and Colette's eyes and the monkey serve as leading lines towards the emerald
And the most complicated in theory and in execution (and the hyperfixation of mathematicians in particular), the golden ratio or phi (φ).
The story behind phi is that Euclid the father of geometry in ancient Greece managed to figure out that there's a way you can divide a whole such that if you added the halves together, they'd be of the exact same ratio that the larger half is to the sum of both. This resulted in the A paper sizes (A0-A8), and a time-transcending mathematical hyperfixation as people began to supposedly see this ratio everywhere in nature and even in geometric theorems that don't seem related to it at first glance. (see Alan Becker's Animation vs. Geometry video where phi is literally the main character alongside the orange stickman.) Seriously people are claiming that the Mona Lisa has it, the human face has it, flowers have it, butterflies have it, the goddamn Parthenon and Taj Mahal have it, the UNIVERSE ITSELF is it-- some of them are stretching it ngl haha). For a while people were calling it (among a lot of names with the word "gold") "the divine proportion"-- the hyperfixation was VERY strong with this one.
Anyway, with the mathematical hyperfixation with phi going incredibly strong, it was only a matter of time before the artists realized and caught onto it. Because artists are nerds /aff. I found it really hard to find a Thea Stilton cover that does have phi in it, but these are the closest ones I could find? I guess? They're not exact-- like I said everything up here is a guideline not a rule and thus you're not required to follow them to the letter-- but I still feel like I had to really finagle it around just to make it fit. I mean I guess Shipwreck's redesigned cover has the girls in a more explicit golden spiral but eehhh it's les subtle there and it's not that well executed imo. The main gist is cool converging spiral = phi-coded. If you want to see a piece that really follows the golden ratio almost exactly, Great Wave Off Kanagawa is one of them (actually there's a whole Wikipedia article listing down every single artwork that is designed with phi in mind, if you'd believe that)
(Fun fact actually, I've heard that rule of thirds is technically just an oversimplification of phi. Understandable because good lord.)
And that's what I know :D and from what you may have noticed if you've been looking at the covers closely, some of them do have multiple of these concepts mixed together! The original Mystery in Paris cover does have a bit of rule of thirds in it-- Colette and the Eiffel tower are spaced such that they're positioned roughly 1/3 away from the sides of the cover, Prince's Emerald has leading lines directing you to the emerald-- Dancing Shadows has a combination of all three of them! Leading lines throughout the entire picture leading towards Violet the focal point (including the spotlight, which I forgot to mark down haha), Violet falling under rule of thirds, and the girls positioned roughly in a golden spiral formation.
So yes a LOT of technical stuff goes into composition, and it really does a lot to make covers (and illustrations in general) look good, alongside a lot of eyeballing.
So with that, let's roast the newer covers :]
Here's Fireflowers's redesign for example, and well, there's already a handful of issues. For one, it feels too crowded. Because Violet and Colette together take up almost half of the entire page, Nicky, Pam, Paulina, and the background have to lump together into the other half, resulting in this crowded feel. The focal point is the volcano on paper, but because Violet is so close to the camera, it means she's competing for the viewer's attention, especially if you consider the fact that the volcano is too far in the background and has Nicky and Paulina blocking it. Having the girls all looking at the volcano to serve as leading lines doesn't really help much, either, because it means your eyes settle on the volcano in a very uncomfortable way (and all you can think about is how the volcano looks like those big smokestack columns at radioactive processing units.
The new covers in general seem to have this obsession with the girls' lines of sight being the leading lines for focal points, but cranked up to the extreme so literally the only leading lines in the covers is them looking in the direction of the thing, maybe even point if they're feeling adventurous that day. It's not bad on its own, but when it's the only way you make your focal point?
I'm realizing I didn't mention lighting in composition, but lighting has a big part in this, too, in that it's a perfect way to set up a focal point. Dark background, bright light, bam, bright light is focal point. The thing is, though, you need to set up the dark background to make it work-- something the new cover seemingly forgot to do. Because everything is so goddamn bright all the time, it makes it really hard to make sources of light any brighter than everything else. I am genuinely curious just how many renditions of the screen layer the colorist had to do before throwing in the towel and being like "yeah close enough". Someone please tell him overlay layers exist, no night sky lights up the environment like a million lumen flashlight. Let the fire shine, give the girls and the environment a bit of yellow and orange in their highlights please.
Even then, though, they really need to make something that isn't the night sky darker, otherwise literally nothing is gonna stand out besides Violet to the left. Right now, everything is too bright, and no amount of the girls staring and pointing is gonna fix the fact that the volcano looks SO unthreatening and out-of-place.
Here's another example, not a redesigned cover but the cover of Ghost of the Woods. Feel free to try drawing your own conclusions on it before I break it down haha:
Okay so while I do like the setup of the girls biking away from what looks like a haunted house, there's way too little emphasis on the haunted house! It feels like the house should be the focal point since it's the vanishing point the girls lead to (aka are heading away from all in a relatively straight line), but instead you follow the girls' eyes looking off to...
Where are the girls looking? Why is it offscreen? Those are leading lines without a thing to lead to. On top of that, the girls once again feel like they're crowding the camera, making the entire picture look too small for all of them-- it feels like the image was cropped even though it was always this size. You can't even make the argument that the girls are looking behind them and to the house, because it'd mean Pam and Paulina are looking the wrong way!
Lighting is better, but the shadows on the girls could shadow more imo, they can do away with some more highlights-- they have so much of it that I'm surprised their vision isn't just 90% flashes of light from all that light they have on them. Too much highlights in the especially shiny ones, I say.
The old ones have charm because they didn't need too much to stand out. They had a good artist with a good grasp of composition to draw the girls and the environment such that neither are overshadowing or crowding over the other, a good colorist who knew how to balance color and values, and a good director in marketing or something who didn't have to tell them "hey uh we need to make this more eye-catching can you add more glitter". They all knew how to work with the simple artstyle they were told to use, and how to use it in a way that'd age well for the viewer, since the viewers are mostly children that are gonna grow up at some point.
Aka me likey :]
Alrighty I'm done if you stuck through this I'm very much surprised--
waahhh I'm obsessed with your artstyle!!! May I ask, what is your design process? You're so good at designing compositions!
thank you!!
As for my design process, I don't usually follow any sort of strict guidelines, but I have noticed recently that a lot of my art lines up with the golden ratio style of composition. Like an unsettling amount. It's scaring me how many line up honestly
Something I've also noticed about the rule of thirds and the golden ratio is that their focal points are in fairly similar places. I think as an overall suggestion, putting the focal point into those general areas in a piece is a good place to start. Also, the background doesn't always have to line up with the composition, but it is a good idea to have something to frame the character near the corners of the piece, typically in the foreground. If the character is dead center, then the background can play a bigger role in the composition by adding either asymmetry or symmetry, or a mix of both. You can also lean the character's face into a focal point, while still keeping them generally in the middle. I tend to do this using perspective like in my most recent Maka art. Whenever I add two characters, I try to make a noticeable size difference between the two to add interest, also typically achieved by perspective.
In more process-y terms, I first make a really rough layout sketch, and then a more detailed one overtop. I usually draw the character first (starting with the head), and then build the background up from there unless I have a really clear vision of what I want the full piece to look like. I also tend to lay out my colors in this stage, too, so I have a clearer idea of how the piece will look and to make sure I have a good color palette. Sometimes I even just straight up use this base for the actual colors but just tidy them up a bit, like I did for my most recent OMORI artwork. I think I also tend to use very saturated colors because my laptop isn't exactly the best at making them look accurate.
I do this because I've been inspired by another artist who tries to make every process of their art look the best it can, so if I'm not entirely confident with how it looks at the sketch, there's a good chance I may not like it at the end. This happens a lot when I do line art and then color afterwards, I always seem to lose my ability to actually make them cohesive lol. If this does happen, I suggest using an absurd amount of blending modes. gradient maps, and maybe color balance to try and get it to work.
For the color side of compositions, I use a lot of dramatic lighting to my advantage in order to make the focal point stand out from the background, or to just use heavy value differences in general. Adding a highlight at the very edges of things also helps the character and their pose stand out more. I also like to add contrast using cool and warm toned/complimentary colors. Fun fact! The typical complimentary colors are kind of fake because they don't include magenta or cyan. I like this color wheel as an example.
I hope this needlessly long composition study helped!
