Have you noticed something aboutHi-Fi Rush?
Beyond it being a lot of colourful fun, that is.
It’s a bit like shading but oversized and deliberate, and layered on almost like a filter.
Superfuse, which comes out today (in early access), does it too.
But why - why are they all doing it?
Well, the obvious answer is that they want to look like an old-fashioned comic strip.
Whatever it is, it probably signals to your brain good things.
I think it’s possible for you to feel this ina video by Bad Ink Studios on TikTok.
Different solvent, different line.
Use both and you get a darker shade.
And the minute I saw it working in the video, I saw comics and got that emotional response.
Duo Shade, then, is clearly responsible for the lines part of the comic look.
But what about the dots?
They are to do with halftone, which I’d been unwittingly seeing around me for years.
Halftone is the process that uses many dots to shade an image.
you might see pop art referencing this a lot.
But Duo Shade and halftone weren’t created intentionally as aesthetics.
That, though, is how aesthetics are born.
It’s almost as though you cannot knowingly create them.
They are, instead, serendipitous consequences of something else.
I think it’s the same with pixel art.
Because when I see it, I see childhood, I see adventure, I see unrestrained fantasy.
It evokes, in other words, a place I am always keen to go back to.
