Behind the scenes of making the artwork for the shooting gallery tutorial!

In this post for patreons in the Supporter tier or higher, I'll be showing some "behind the scenes" photos of the making of the artwork for the shooting gallery tutorial and talk a bit about it.

First of all, I use Clip Studio Paint EX for my artwork. It is my all-time-favourite program for illustrating in. It has so many good features that I use all the time such as nice line-art brushes, decorative brushes (for adding patterns, plants, ribbons, all kinds of things), 3D model posing with character models and props that you can use as a base for drawing (or convert into lineart with neat built in functionality!), filters and layer effects. The asset store has many cool things one can download and add to the program too, such as brushes and patterns for example. 

For this tutorial, I went ahead and created a custom but quite simple 3D model of the shooting gallery as seen from the "outside" in Blender to use as a base for the line-art for the first scene. Clip Studio has a handy 3D model "manager" program (I'm using the EX version of Clip Studio Paint which has all the features available. Not sure if the modeler program comes with the pro version) that one can use to import own 3D models to convert for use in Clip Studio Paint.

After I import the model to Clip Studio Paint I position and align it as I want and then set the 3D layer to a lower alpha to make it more transparent. Then I go ahead and make some line-art on top on a raster layer using the model as a base. This is helpful for perspective reasons.

PSST! Right click an image and choose "open image in new tab" to view it in full size.

I then go ahead and add additional things such as the balloons and prize shelf toys.

The people in the scene are image assets from the asset store of Clip Studio. There's free ones and paid ones (using either Gold credits which can be purchased, or using "Clippy tokens" which can be obtain by other means). There are many talented artists that add stuff to the store of various kinds (3d models, image assets, brushes etc.) one can use in their illustrations for things like comics/manga or other illustration purposes.

I then color the image as I like. In this case I decided the scene would be in the evening/night and shaded it accordingly. 

For the actual shooting gallery mini-game screen, I drew all the images from my mind.  Starting with the line-art and then coloring it in. I actually started out with this scene first, and then later on I decided that it would be good to have another scene for the tutorial as the starting scene as well, so I could demonstrate how to make certain things for the game work.

The image below shows the background images, cork gun, score and time background image in the top left corner and a test cork bullet, drawn and put together in Clip Studio Paint. The cork bullet had a motion blur added to test/see what it would look like.

The spotlights look different in this image than it does in the Ren'Py tutorial game, as Ren'Py's additive blending mode works differently than in Clip Studio (where the spotlights are on a layer with additive blending mode as well).

Regarding the frames for the target animation, I got some help from my lovely boyfriend who is really knowledgeable when it comes to 2D animation. He showed me how to make use of "smear frames" to use less frames overall while also making the animation easier on the eye to observe. 

He also showed how I could include a "bounce" effect of the target as it goes down by making the two last frames (3 and 4 on the image above) repeat twice. If you observe how a classic shooting gallery works, and have an eye for detail, you'll notice that this is quite common behavior of the targets.

The above .gif includes the frames he made in Photoshop using my target image as an example. I then put the frames together to test what it would look like animated by using a .gif making program setting each frame's duration/delay in seconds by experimenting with it. Looks really cool! I was/am so impressed by his work and the finished look!

Hope this gave a little insight into how I made the artwork. Thanks for reading!

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