Have you ever ordered a commission or seen a post and not been entirely sure what the terms all mean?

Don’t worry, a lot of people are in that boat.

Basically every new commission that comes my way, my patron isn’t really sure what most of the terms I use mean. I don’t want to disparage people or make them feel left out so I try to explain everything to the best of my ability.

One of the biggest points of confusion I seem to see is; What is a Line Art? And what do the terms “Flat Color” and “Full Render” mean. Not everyone can be expected to know those terms. And maybe my own understanding of them isn’t the most accurate.

This post at least describes how I use the terms.

Line Art:
A line art is basically what it sounds like. Black (or grey) lines, that have been refined to the point that whatever you do with the image from that point, the lines themselves will not change.

I believe the term Line Art became popularized by animation and comic books; Not all art uses line art, but pretty much all comics and 2-d animation use them.

In traditionally drawn comics you have multiple stages of an artwork or comic page; A thumbnail sketch that outlines the very rough gesture of a panel or full page, a refined sketch that blocks in the details, anatomy and , Pencils which takes the sketch and finalizes and refines all the details; Often the pencils stage is indistinguishable from the next step, and can be considered the first of two finished Line Art phases of a comic; The net step is the Inks; In this step, the artist goes over all of the pencil lines in black ink using a brush pen, fountain pen, or multiliner type pen, to give a nice hard contrast between the whites and blacks on their canvas.

In digital comics, there is no Pencils stage, and the Line Art is both the Pencils and Inks stages in one.

Sometimes line art is just black and white, other times people (including myself) will add flat grey fills to separate the lines from the background and give a bit of contrast between the elements of the piece.

One thing to note is that many people use the term Line Art to refer to everything after this stage. For example they will say “A flat color line art” or a “Full Rendered Line Art”

Here are a few examples of Line Art that I’ve done over the past few months.

Flat Color

Once a line art has been completed, the next step is always to add the flat color base to the art; Flat color refers to the baseline colors of the art without values or lights; The color for the ambient lighting overlay gets added later, before the values are added.

In traditional comics, this is usually the last stage for the panels and internal pages, although they may differentiate colors between midtones and darks, or midtones and lights, for emphasis a majority of the art inside comics are usually flat color. They do this to save time and money because the comic world can be a bit grueling, and even with 5-10 people working on a comic, it’s jsut not feasible to get fully rendered art into every page on the deadlines that these people work with.

Another note is that in comics, they’ll often have shadows built into the line art as solid black colors. In manga art the addition of these black shadows which is also used for hair, blood, and a anything that’s DARK in color, since most manga is black and white, is referred to as the Beta step, which is a separate step from the line art. In manga once the Beta phase is complete, instead of adding color they use screen tones and halftones to add values to the art. These are the terms for the tiny black and white dot patterns that make up the shading in manga art.

For things like comic book covers, this Flat Color step might be eschewed altogether (especially in traditional media comics). However, this step has been used in art as far back as the renaissance, and a lot off the final colors in their paintings were nothing like what the final colors looked like. Really, more to show where the color is going this is a way to block in the separation of each color shape to shade (Like an over-complicated paint-by-number where it’s color coded instead of numbered)

Here are some examples of flat colors, using the same images I showed above!

Full Detail Render

This is were the meat of the art comes in. This is often the most complex and time consuming part off an artwork.

The final piece itself is called a full detail render, however the PHASE is called the Rendering phase. This could mean a lot of things but the basics are, you’re rendering the lights and shadows and finalizing the colors.

Some rendered pieces only have the base color and shadow (Or the base color and highlights). I refer to these pieces as 2-Tone Value pieces. A lot of characters in American cartoons and animation are done as 2-tone artwork. Most of the time this is just to save time when animating the same character changing poses 300 times per second, because that’s a lot of work to do.

Another type of rendered piece would be the 3-tone rendering, which in 3d animation is referred to ass cell shading. 3-tone can either have hard lines (like in most anime) or softer, partially blended lines to show a smooth gradient between the lights, mid-tones, and darks on any given part of an image.

There are probably numerous other stages you can add between the 3-tone shading and this next one, but they’re all a matter of taste and style. For me personally the next version of rendering would be the Full Detail render.

A full detail render refers to when you’re trying to take your line art from flat color to as realistically detailed as possible, and instead of breaking it up by how many levels of values there are, you’re trying to include as many variations as you need to represent what that line art would look like if it were real.

Now, the styles one could use on a full detail render are innumerable. Infinite. You could be going for full-on photorealism, or you could be going for “Real enough” or semi-realism. It may also just mean that you’ve decided to go with 5-6 levels of value instead of 3, and blended a bit.

Here are the full detail renderings of the prior three examples I’ve shown you:

The first example, my artwork entitled Limbo – Tarot Card XVI Redesign which was commissioned by J Althina, was drawn and rendered using my full-detail semi-realism method. It incorporates 3 base values (Mid-tone, Light tone, and Shadow) with the addition of cast shadows, and three separate light sources of different colors (A yellow spotlight from the fire, a red spotlight from the blood moon, and a white ambient light from the viewer’s perspective) as well as internal lighting on the moon, fire, and smoke.

The second example, my work entitled Therian – Comic Cover Mockup which was commissioned by Bones, was done in my American comic style, and was rendered using a gradient style 3-tone shading, with a blue-light spotlight angled 45 degrees downward toward the character’s face. The shadows are tinted violet, the wings are iridescent and transparent, and the neon greens cast an ambient internal light of their own, contrasting with the rest of the piece.

The third example, entitled Zatha Rinn – Togruta Character Portrait, which was commissioned by J Crowley, was done in a much simpler rendering style. There is only one light source, which comes from the viewer. That light source is bouncing reflected light off of the background onto the edges of the character, but there are only 5 base values overall: 2 shadow tones (Ambient shadow and cast shadow) 2 light tones (Ambient light and high light) and the base mid-tone.

This is a LOT off information, but hopefully I’ve laid it out in a way that’s generally easy to understand for anyone who has considered commissioning me and been not entirely sure what these terms refer to!

For anyone who is confused about other terms or items of interest and wants to know more, always feel free to reach out. I’m happy to advise.