I had a chance today to try out MyPaint again and used two images from the Aquaria Media Kit as a reference this time. The Wet Round and Ink brushes are where it's at for me it seems. I never even knew such a brush existed a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty awesome. With Naija, her shading is more subdued than most other creatures in the game. It was difficult for me not to add too much contrast when coloring, but I'm pretty happy with the result of my concept character. I also took the liberty of just slightly darkening the limbs behind her torso and, though the effect is subtle, I think it adds a bit of punch.
I ended up scaling the picture down 50% from the resolution I originally created it at, as is seen in the image above. This seems to fix any harsh edges and still keeps a painted feel. I'm going to play around some more, but I think I'm almost there.
As far as her design goes, I'm struggling a bit with her not being all that attractive, but I always thought this character was a bit more animal and alien than human. Perhaps some hair on her head is in order. Also, I'm going to have to figure out how to break a character like this up for animation. That's going to be a lot of work, I think. It may also affect how I create the details surrounding the character's joints and such. For example, I plan on having her webbed feet bend back (like you currently see) and forward when she kicks with a simple sprite swap. I have yet to try the animator though so we'll see what other ideas come from that experience. I even thought about using the cape feature for a braided length of hair. There's just so many avenues to explore.
Other than that, I'm going to start creating concept art for my mod and see if a story is buried somewhere in those sketches.
Kind of off topic, but does anybody know of a free 2D sprite animation tool, like Aquaria's? The reason I ask is that, with MyPaint, I've been thinking about taking this 2D painted sprite look to other genres, like sierra-like adventure and metroid style action games, but a majority of those engines want a unique complete sprite for each frame of animation. As far as I know, you can't export frames from Aquaria's animator while keeping the alpha channel intact. Maybe this open source thing might change all that though. Did I mention that MyPaint totally rocks and I never would have found it without the link in the Aquaria Wiki?
