Warning - disorganized collection of thoughts below. Basically I'm confused & don't have a clue how to achieve what I'm after.. In case you haven't seen them, The Powerpuff Girls & The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy are cartoons on Cartoon Network that use a very distinct, clean & bold drawing style. Regardless of your opinions on the shows themselves, I'm working on a 2d game & want the sprites and backgrounds to resemble the style in some way but I don't really know how to begin. Does this style of animation/drawing have a name or a set of rules that I could follow? For instance, I've noticed that the thick lines drawn around the foreground objects vary in width depending on the size of the character/object. However, sometimes they're black, sometimes they're a darker shade of the object it's bordering. Lines drawn inside the border are thinner - the difference is visible on Billy's nose, but also note how the inner holes in Grim's legs are not drawn with a thick line. The backgrounds usually comprise of very simple line art, but the detail is usually provided by brush texture and colour (eg, a flat wall is not drawn with a single shade of colour, instead 2-3 variations are used in a kind of patchwork distribution - example) There's probably more to it than this - for instance the palettes used - but this is where I get lost. I'm not looking to copy the characters, just the style itself. If someone could identify the name of the style (if it exists) for me to research that would be great, any general cel-shading links would be appreciated as well. More examples of varying quality here or on myspleen... Cheers

Hey bud, I think this might be what you're looking for.
Clicky

As far as actually drawing them... can't help you there.

It *might* be called 'Selout' (Selective Outlining).
Selout

You seem to have the key components of the style identified. Now just draw keeping those in your mind (or printed out hanging above you).

I think Professor is right - just try drawing it until you can match it. Where you see the thicker outlines, it's usually where two thinner outlines have met up on the outer edge of the character. Anyways, just draw some of the screen captures you have there, and you'll be well on your way.

Also, it isn't really celshading, as there is no shading! Teen Titans, for example, celshades, but not so much Billy and Mandy.

Thanks for the replies. Selout isn't quite what I'm looking for, but it's a useful link so I'm not complaining. I'm doing the art in paint.net and photoshop and not using any 3d models so I need to draw it rather than use rendering tricks. As an aside I've yet to see an implementation of toon-shading that looks as clean as a drawing - outlines look jaggy & don't always join up correctly. I imagine this is due to the number of polygons used.

Quote:

Original post by Avatar God Also, it isn't really celshading, as there is no shading! Teen Titans, for example, celshades, but not so much Billy and Mandy.

Hehe, yeah I realised afterwards that I'd mixed up the terms. To be fair there's a bit of shading on the background example pic, and a more pronounced example here (actually this also shows the black/non-black outlines as well..), but yeah, normally there's little to no shading.

I'm not sure which is better tbh - no shading makes it look clean but lacking in detail, but as I'm not primarily an artist any attempt I make to add shading usually results in unrealistic images, mainly because I have no idea how to light objects effectively (I'd like to learn though, if anyone knows some good colouring tutorials?)

If I understand the style you are after, Paper Mario used it for the foreground objects (the backgrounds objects where more "2D in 3D" - it was supposed to look like the buildings and such where painted/drawn on piece of paper folded into the desired 3D shapes)

I've played the GC version (Thousand Year Door, the only RPG I've actually enjoyed in recent years.) - yes I suppose it's kind of like that, although I'm not after the 3d part.