YS II Lilia MSX1 Style: Techniques for Making Skin Tones Look Beautiful Part 1

Do you like Lilia?

I drew the opening conversation scene with Lilia from YS II using MSX1 rule constraints. (8-pixel horizontal limit with 2 colors, sprite assistance used.)
I paid attention to two things to make the skin tone look beautiful; can you tell what they are?

In a related note, I have posted about how the MSX1 palette is not suited for skin tone expression, so please check that out first if you are interested.

I used 14 sprites to draw the black outline and the white parts of the right cheek and mouth.

View without sprites. It's scary.

Close-up of the view with sprites. Lilia is cute, isn't she? By the way, I'm probably in the minority, but I'm more of a Feena fan than a Lilia fan. Isn't it more romantic that they can't be together because of the goddess's duty, rather than just being a village girl? (There was no scene where they were drawn to each other, so it's just my delusion.)

The human eye performs exposure adjustment unconsciously

This might seem like it came out of nowhere, but please bear with me as it is the foundational concept for the techniques I will explain later.

You have probably experienced how, when you suddenly enter a bright outdoor area from a dark place like a tunnel, you are blinded and can't see anything, but after a while, you start to see. Or, when you enter a dark room from a bright outside, you can't see anything, but after staying there for a while, you get used to it. This happens because, although the human eye has a function to automatically adjust the brightness range input to the brain according to the situation, the adjustment cannot keep up. The brightness range of light in the natural world is so incredibly wide that humans cannot process all the information at once, so it is automatically adjusted to capture only the important range. White can become gray or black, and red can become pink or brown.

Digital cameras and smartphones have automatic exposure adjustment, and that is exactly what functions for the same purpose.

I want to make color 11, yellow, look vivid

I will apply this to CG work. There was a retro PC somewhere that only had dull colors in its palette, right...?

This time, I used color 11, yellow, for the main part of the skin tone, but unfortunately, color 11 yellow is not vivid and has a grayish tint. I will apply a trick so that people who see the CG will unconsciously perform exposure compensation and perceive it as vivid.

Don't use white!

If you look closely at the previous CG, all the parts that would normally use white are actually color 14, gray. If you look very closely, it is indeed gray, but I think you perceived it as white at first glance.

Because the clouds and skin highlights are gray, the viewer unconsciously judges the entire image to be dark, which increases their sensitivity to vividness and makes the yellow, which usually looks dull, appear vivid. Can't believe it?

Actually, I also intentionally shifted the background sky color to a darker shade. While there are many parts where the color balance is maintained as a complementary color, if I were to place color 7, light blue, instead of this color, it would be quite a vivid color, which would make the yellow look dull.

At this point, you must not get lost and add white anywhere. Doing so will only end up highlighting the dull yellow.

I adjusted the previous image and placed a standard light blue background and white highlights. While some people might prefer this version, I think Lilia's skin tone ends up looking a bit like she has a tan. Huh? Healthy and cute? That is certainly true. If that is what you are aiming for, then that is fine!

There is a point of caution here: if you compare these two images alternately, you cannot correctly evaluate the impression of the art. No, since I pasted them together for comparison, it is of course fine to compare them, but you will get a different impression than the one you feel when looking at one of them at a glance. If you go back to the former after looking at the latter, you will likely get the impression that it is dull and strange overall.

Separation from other art is necessary

A style of painting the whole image with dull colors is often used in general illustrations, but when showing it to people or presenting it, you must not line it up next to other pop art. Not only will it not be evaluated correctly, but it might even end up serving as a mere foil. Picture frames are useful for displaying art at real-world events, but I believe they are necessary not just to look good, but to physically secure the territory of that painting. It is best to have a large margin between the frame decoration and the painting as well.

What about presenting it on the web? In the case of Note, the background color is forced to white, which is inconvenient. For X, you can choose between dark mode and light mode, but since some people are viewing it on bright screens, I would like to come up with some countermeasures.

Let's provide a black margin

Can you see that many of the images in this post have large black margins around the art? This is intentional, and I am doing it so that it is less affected by the white background color of the Note page.

No, the original YS II opening also has a composition with many black margins, but I think that was done more for memory or file size reduction. When I draw Lilia's CG in MSX1 style, I intended to draw it as large as possible (because the intermediate colors are cleaner and it is easier to express details), but the reason I held back this time and kept the layout of the opening scene as is was to keep the bright white from entering the field of vision as much as possible.

Trying to create a backlit situation

I wrote earlier that you should not place pure white when attempting to create CG with a combination of intentionally dull colors, but I will try to place it anyway. That is when reproducing a backlit situation.

The way the shadows fall is not a typical painting style to express backlighting, but since there are countless light sources in the natural world, it could look like this sometimes. There is no sense of discomfort as a whole. In fact, you might even feel a sense of freshness. No, actually, this picture might be the best one...

In this way, even with dull yellow, it is possible to give a vivid impression as a whole.

Summary

Human perception of color and brightness is not absolute but relative, and therefore, through the clever placement of colors, you can give an impression different from the original colors. This time, I talked about making things look vivid by dulling the whole image, but there are many such techniques, and I always approach drawing MSX1-style art with a strategy to make the most of the shabby palette colors. I am thinking of procedures and processes that make it harder for image converters and Photoshop tools (I don't know how far they can go) to produce things that look like obvious filters where colors with similar RGB values are simply placed as intermediate colors.

Well, I will continue to take my time with these reading-style posts and work creation, so I look forward to your continued support. (Having said that, I plan to take a break from MSX-related things for about half a year after one or two more posts. I am busy preparing to participate in a certain event.)

Bonus: Other CG where I worked hard on skin tones

When I drew Milika from Zarth, I also drew the picture after carefully considering how to make the skin tones look beautiful. It is a different strategy from the method I explained this time, and I am currently writing that explanatory post.

For these Gram Cats as well, I adjusted the parameters given to the converter several times so that the skin tones would look beautiful. I think I have been able to produce an impression of colors that are unlike MSX1.