Illustration

Orville (Spring) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Orville (Summer) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Orville (Fall) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Huck (Spring) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Huck (Summer) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Huck (Fall) - Digital Illustration, 2025

Early on, I went for a hyper-toony style with clean lines and more saturated colors. The drawings came out unrefined, and I generally wasn't sure about the visual direction. The prince's characterization was also still being developed at the time. Originally he was thought of as much more "cool", which this drawing sort of encapsulates with his sharper eyes and more confident posture and expression.

After scrapping the initial artwork, I pivoted in the complete opposite direction, trying to make something slightly more painterly and traditional looking. In particular, I looked to the artworks of Nao Ikeda and Ryoma Ito on Children of Mana, as well as Akihiko Yoshida, who is generally one of my greatest artistic inspirations. I also softened the prince's expression and rounded his eyes more, bringing him generally more in line with the gentle and goofy personality he has. While I was a fan of this style experiment, others felt that it clashed with the tone of the game and would rather see something closer to my usual style, which is often compared to comic books.

Next, I brought the prince closer in line with my typical art style, which I was still developing at the time. For this drawing in particular, I started to bring in some 90's anime influence, especially in the style of the lines, colors, and eyes. While I was generally happy with the style of this drawing at the time, the pose was kind of a bad choice for what was meant to be his key artwork. You're looking at him from behind, after all... So I decided to take another crack at it, which gave me an opportunity to develop the style further.

The current Fetch art style was an attempt to combine everything that worked about all of the previous style experiments. Since it was popular with the people I showed it to and fit the tone of the game, I dialed up the comic influences by thickening the lines, deepening the value contrast in the cell shading, and adding a subtle halftone effect. The more traditional influences remained in the style of the lines and the color choices. Fetch generally leans towards warm browns in its color palette, which inspires the use of a dark red for its line art rather than black, and the fact that pure white is almost never used (aside from snow). This comes from the old anime and manga influence, mostly. A lot of the manga I read in my school library as a kid had yellowed a bit, and that sort of look is very nostalgic to me.