Cel Style Shading

When it comes to digital painting/illustration, you can go about by either flat colors or getting the photo-realistic rendering of the illustration. We have seen the share of flat colored illustrations from those old Disney movies and the comics about a decade ago.

Then gradually, comics and animation movies started to grow a style where in the rendering was done midway between these two options. It was not just flat colors, as the highlights and shadows were painted to render the light on the subject. It was not a photo-realistic either, as there is not much of a value/color variation between the shadow tones, mid tones and light tones.

Technically, Cel Shading is a type of non-photorealistic rendering employed in 3D art. When 3D modeling emerged as an art form out of the utilitarian CAD works, the aim was to get as much of a photo-realism as possible. While there is still drive towards such an effort, another style form emerged where the rendering of the 3D models were made to appear to be hand-drawn.

The term ‘Cel‘ was due to the use of something called celluloid - a transparent sheet - in traditional animation. The subjects were painted on a transparent sheet so that the background need not be drawn again and again for each frame. This allowed for having more elaborate background which otherwise would not have been possible due to the daunting task of reproducing the background for every frame.

Thus, the term ‘Cel’ that was used for traditional animation got carried over to computer graphics for 3d rendering, and then it seems like there is style emerging for digital paintings/illustrations. I am not even sure if it can be called a digital painting or a digital illustration as the style keeps the rendering in between the two of them. They are not flat colored or just line arts, as the light is hinted by presence of shadow and highlights. They are not even photo-realistic as this style of artwork does not show gradation in color and value from shadow to mid-tone to highlights.

This is a pretty interesting style, and I have started exploring it. So, expect some more series of videos and tutorials on the subject.

Of course, I will have some vector tutorials too, as Phillip had asked for.