Making character portraits with public domain art

I can’t draw, I won’t use AI, and my creative process is too disorganised to commission an artist. That’s why I’m always looking for unconventional ways to make art for my projects.

For my current project, a narrative game (still untitled) about art rivals, I used Rawpixel to find public domain portraits for the characters. I then traced them, terribly, and coloured them in, also terribly. The messy approach is a conscious decision for 2 main reasons:

1. I’m trying to break the habit of perfectionism, since it prevents me from finishing things, or even starting them.
2. The drawing app I’m using on my tablet has the habit of crashing and corrupting whatever I was working on, so it’s better if I finish fast!

After tracing and colouring in, I layered the original image over the top to bring some of the detail and shading back in. I then made different coloured backgrounds in the same style to tie all the portraits together. I really want to use the character background colours as their name colours in the game.

Here are the 5 characters I’ve made so far using this method:

• Top row (L-R): Protagonist Pauline Vogelhaus, rival artists Maisie Babcock and Hans Habermann (I’ll fix his jaundice later, or maybe I’ll work liver failure into the story).
  
• Bottom row (L-R): Rival artists Edward Albright and Nigel the Child Prodigy (accidentally looks like Billie Eilish??).

From public domain art, to game asset:

(I had to tame his crazy hair).

The character art for my game Margaret’s Spoons was also made in an unconventional way. I created Vtuber models in VRoid Studio (free software), screenshotted their different expressions and poses, then massively downscaled them so they fit the 1bit 84x48px resolution. Of course, they looked like mashed potatoes after that, and I still had to do a lot (I mean, a lot) of pixel by pixel editing, but at least this method meant that the characters always looked like themselves, even at different angles, and I didn’t have to draw them from scratch! Yay. Turns out you can do lots of things if you’re masochistic enough.