Smash's FFT Portrait Tutorial Thread (Shading woes die now)

[Smash]

-Smash's grand FFT portrait tutorial thread-   

WIP

Got inspired while helping Jimmy on a portrait sketch, and then got my mind full of ideas for a tut. Had to write them down before I forgot them. This, and all the notes I had for the tut I was going to make before, im organizing now.


Current:
Facial elements [WIP]
Bases [WIP]






Making FFT portraits, the basics
Chapter 1: Sketching the head

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-Sketching the head Done!

spoiler

An important step in determining the overall appearance of your portrait.
You start with the brush tool (1 pixel size) and simply draw, erasing and fixing away until reaching the desired shape. Your goal here is to stay within size by FFT standarts, and making your head anatomy as closely as possible to other pre-existing portraits.


I want my character to have the same pose as a squire, so Im keeping it around my file everytime.

Hence, for this step, it is crucial to have other portraits lying around as references, especially those with the particular head tilt you want. This way you can compare if you're in the correct size. Your invaluable companion here should be the lasso tool, or the select tool; this to move lines around to your liking, and to your reference's aproval.


Checking my references to see if mine's ok with the size. Yup.

Optional: I recommend an open canvas with at least 500x350 minimum in size, as you are going to experiment alot and move things around. It also helps to keep copies of your progress around, as well as using a canvas color other than white, such as the FFT portrait background color.

Important: You should not get over this stage until you're confortable with what you've got.

-Head poses in FFT Done!

spoiler

FFT portraits usually have the character's heads looking at a direction to the side, yet they lean to a variety of directions and their poses vary much. This can be a powerful tool to develop and portray personalities, emotions, and individuality in our characters. It's highly recommended to experiment with this aspect while sketching the concept.

By far, the most common and useful head tilts in FFT:


Down tilt: Asociated with anger, seriousness, determination, willpower, vengeance.
Front tilt: Leading role, strenght, loyalty, innocent, hero, quest.
Upwards tilt: Faith, dream, hope, seeker, visionary, ambition.

These are suggestions only, need not to be taken as absolute, as you can alter them to your liking.

-Facial elements (eye mouth bro)


-Chapter 2: Working on the line art

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-Male and female distinctions
-Getting a good grasp at the anatomy (types old m head size alignment)
-Bases
-Refining the lines (tech)

[Smash]

-Chapter 3: Facial shading 1- Palletes

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-Facial palletes Done!

spoiler

We can find many different palletes in FFT, but the ones used mostly for skin can be rounded down to these five samples. Organized and labeled based on their standard uses, yet you can use them any way you want if you find it most apropiate.
 
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First skin pallete is the extended warm pallete, and takes 8 colours. This is the standard skin tone to use. It's darker browns can easily ramp up with reds and yellows.

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The next skin pallete is the extended cool pallete. Use this one if you want the character's skin to stand out a bit. It's darker, grayed shades ramp well with cool colours like blue, green, whites and the like.

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Next up, the contrast pallete. Takes only 7 colours and works well for making shadows.

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The economy warm pallete. Same as the warm pallete but with 7 colours.

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Economy cool pallete. Same as the cool pallete, 7 colours.

-Rules of colour (more)

-Chapter 4: Facial shading 2- General

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-Face shading explained Done!

spoiler

The actual shading part. Make sure that your lineart looks too awesome to behold, take a skin colour pallete and read on. If them lines lack satisfactory form or shape, go back to chapter one.

In this chapter, the shading process has been simplified into three simple steps to allow easier understanding. for the first step, one should bucket fill the lines on the sketch and have the face area covered with the brightest skin tone (A). Once you get the general idea of the colours you want, take the next darker skin shade of your pallete and apply the soft shadows on the neck, jaw and most of the left sides of the face (B); let the lightsource be your guide. Bits of it can go on shady areas like under the hair, under eyebrows and the like.  Simple step, but have many references at your disposal notheless.



Second step is to shade the lines and lines only. This is why lines are all important, the shading basically  depends on them! Take your reference and use the darker shades to color the lines according to lightsource. Generally, the cheek on the right side gets lighter colors, and they gradate down till they reach the chin, now having a dark brown or black. The line then extending to the ear gradates to the lighter color once again, and sometimes vanishes in the skin.



Eyes, eyebrows, mouth and ears are lines too, so now's the time to make them. Use the references to make them right, and tune them up later to match your intentions.



A basic shadow and colored lines, yeah, we're almost finished. The third step in shading faces is to add the darker shadows in. Usually these are found mainly under the chin, neck, and sometimes under accesories or hair. In my example, the only notable one is under the chin, so I darken that area. Remember to always use references to get  them right.
 


Once you do, you might want to add some pixels here and there to anti-alias things a bit, and after that, you're done. There's no room for overshading in FFT, and neither for banding and pillowshading. Yet if they persist still, see their respective chapters.

-The banding sacrilege
-The pillow blasphemy
-Refining the facial elements (eye, lines, bnd)

[Smash]

-Chapter 5: General shading

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-Cloth
-Hood
-Armor
-Accesories
-Shiny and rusted metal

[Smash]

-Chapter 6: Hair shading

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This is going to be hell.

-Chapter 7: Other

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[Smash]

-Review- Practical, step by step process on making FFT portraits
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The actual step by step exercise tutorial. (priority)

1. Sketch
2. Refine lines
3. Fill and shade shadow
4. Refine shading
5. Clothing
6.






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This thread serves as the announcement.

I'll be contributing to this from time to time, until it has enough to get stickied. Posting can start!
Suggestions related to topics are welcome once I get this rolling.

[MiKeMiTchi]

Interesting~!
Oh btw, I think it would be better if you disable your signature between posts.

[Kagebunji]

Damn, finally I will learn how to do ports. I always wondered how Jimmy got soo great looking portraits when he started, now I know, you helped him to sketch

[Asmo X]

So who is going to volunteer to go through the Custom Sprite database and redo all the portraits when this tutorial is up?

[Kagebunji]

Haha, I volunteer, but not all, only my Lezard

[mav]

Holy shit. This is the tutorial we've been waiting for. Especially those shading sections. Ahh, I can't wait. Great stuff, Smash.

[jimmyjw88]

So looking forward to this. Thanks a million, Smash.

[R999]

Looking forward to the completion of this tutorial Smash good stuff. The most difficult challenge when it comes to portraits is not about drawing a good looking portrait itself but rather actually trying to replicate the style of the original artist. Yes, indeed as Asmo X have pointed we could change all that, just change all the game's portraits. In some ways, such as changing the choice of colors used in a global scale, for example, is a plausible approach. Adding noses etc however -- that's something I'll personally want to avoid (not saying that it won't look better though).

Edit: Oops I think i have misread what Asmo had said.. but I am sure you get my point anyway.

[Smash]

Working on the face shading sections. They're priority now.

After that, the step by step process in general.

Looking forward to the completion of this tutorial Smash good stuff. The most difficult challenge when it comes to portraits is not about drawing a good looking portrait itself but rather actually trying to replicate the style of the original artist.

In my opinion, replicating styles is quite easy, as everything is given there for you to work. Practice correctly and you'll learn fast.

The difficulty of portrait making and sprite making in general is, to have what you want look decent in pixels. It's probably one of the hardest digital mediums there is.

[Smash]

Update +2!


Now to make the face elements section. Learn where to place eyes, mouth, hair. After that, I'll do the Bases section, to display alot of pre-made head poses for free use.

[Cheetah]

AWESOME!!!!

[jimmyjw88]

AMAZING!!! Thanks a ton!!

[Twinees]

Looks good so far Smash, but i bet we are all waiting for the hair part
Looking forward.

[jimmyjw88]

spoiler

Let's look at the tut:

Make sure that your lineart looks too awesome to behold

Here's where the problem lies, on step one. (Lines are like, THE most important thing!) This is why his right cheek looks too pixelated.

Use more references. If you stumble upon things like this, don't hesitate to fix the lineart and improve. Make the cheek more rounded like those refs, and move around the face elements to get a good result. Also, if pixels on the cheek seem to stand out and look loud, tone them down to make them blend.

(This should go in the thread btw, so people can see the crits. Can you post it?)

I took 3 refs and your lines, moved the lines over the refs to see if they were to style, noticed your face was shrunk a bit, moved around eyes and stuff. Took less than a minute[attachment=0:18j9jqnu]Upload6.png[/attachment:18j9jqnu]

[Kagebunji]

Hmhmhm, after this is done, everyone will be capable of pulling out a great ports, lookin forward! >

[Mobius]

I say all the masterful spriters/artists here around now should help me out to contribute their versions and workstyles in this thread as part of the tutorial. After all, it's a paragraph and a few step-by-step pictures what's needed for each topic.

(Twin/Lijj/Kage I am looking at you)