I like to experiment. What I love the most is comibing styles. I love how the anime Madoka Magica, combines absolutely every animation style in dark poetic harmony. I love the game Omori, which made me want to experiment with photos and dithering.

I really like dithering images and playing with indexed color palettes.

I’m still trying to find a process that would give the best results but the one on the right is the one I’m the most happy with.

I started by trying to find how Omori battle backgrounds were made, by recreating them, so that I could understand the process. Basically, they use royalty free images, make some modifications, put them together and apply dithering and color indexing.

One of the last steps before a perfect recreation, right before dithering and color indexing.

I decided to experiment by taking different photos, cropping and putting them together to make a whole character (here, Genk Leman from Dojordin) and then reducing the colors to 3 per individual photos.

Without dithering

It’s nice. But finding royalty free images that correspond to what you want isn’t always easy. I tried using AI to generate images instead. Leonardo.AI allows to draw on a canvas and it convert it to AI images. I don’t really support AI images, and I wouldn’t use them as final product (also because it’s not that good) but if used correclty, I can see that being a step in a process. (not very conclusive right now)

Pro : I wouldn’t have been able to find photos to match my original character design.

Cons : The time it took to make that is similar to the time it would’ve taken to draw it myself so I’m not sure there’s any reason to do that.

I also tried putting my drawings into AI filters. I realised it can give pretty fun results if you use it very badly. See, if you just use it as intended, you’re gonna get the same kind of stuff that everyone else. But by doing stuff you’re not supposed to, you can get interesting stuff.

Here’s my original drawing, a Dojordin character. The AI would’ve liked me to use a filter like anime or fantasy character but instead I put it into “landscape painting”

Original

I like the random aspect of AI, I’d like to experiment more on taking images and filtering them to oblivion to see what would come out. Then tweak the final result with my own touch.