March M.O.D.O.K. Madness 2019 - Part 6

March M.O.D.O.K. Madness 2019

(Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing)

Well, it's my last submission to the March M.O.D.O.K. Madness Blog for 2019!  The month just flew past, faster than a NOS-fueled Mechano-Chair!

In this case, it is a callback to the side-scrolling video games of yesteryear, with their pixels and jaggies in all their 16-bit glory.  Yes, it's M.O.D.O.K. vs. Arnim Zola, engaged in... MORTAL KOMBAT!  [Queue the titular 90's techno song.]

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STEP ONE: Here is a little peek behind the curtain with a scan of the original doodle which became this post.  It was just a quickly scribbled idea in a sketchbook (about 30-to-60 seconds), but it ended up pretty close to the finished drawing.

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STEP TWO:  These are the digital pencils, done on two separate levels--one for the characters of M.O.D.O.K. and Arnim Zola, the other with the slightly Kirby-esque background.  As usual, they are just a quickly scribbled mess to give a rough idea of what goes where.

The original drawing canvas is 2,100px by 1,500px at 300dpi.

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STEP THREE:  And here are the digital inks, done in Clip Studio Paint.

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STEP FOUR:  Followed by the colors, which were done on a separate Multiply Layer.  Hmmm, now that I look at it, I probably should have done the Cosmic Cube in blue outline.  Oh, well.  Live and learn.  Well, live, anyways...

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STEP FIVE:  And, finally, to get it to look like a right-proper 16-bit video game screen, it took a surprising amount of trail-and-error.  Originally, I imported it into Photoshop, dropped the resolution from 300dpi to 72dpi.  But, Photoshop was anti-aliasing it, so it just looked blurry as heck and not like an old 16-bit video game.  

Finally, I figured out to use the Resample option for "Nearest Neighbor (hard edges)" when resizing it, which kept aliasing and made the downshift in quality jaggy in all the right ways.  

So, for those of you nerdy enough to care: It went from the original 2,100px by 1,500px at 300dpi, then shrank the image way down to 504px by 360px at 72dpi while keeping the aliasing, then blew it back up to 1,200px by 857px at 200dpi.  Ta-da!

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This was done digitally in Clip Studio Paint with an assist from Photoshop.

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