It Is Hard to Draw a Ghost

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but Little Ghosthunter contains ghosts. It’s pretty neat.

Here’s the thing. Drawing living things is easy because we’ve all seen them, so we know what they look like. We understand their biology. Drawing ghosts is more complicated, because no one really knows what they look like. They could look like regular people, or little white blobs, or just a bunch of gases.

This week, I thought I would show you guys how I decided on the design for my ghosts.

The Beginning

Say hello to this purple ghost over here. He will be our model.

At the start, I only had a vague idea of what I wanted the ghosts to look like. I knew they would be see-through, and I knew they would glow. The design above wouldn’t fit the game’s art style, so I needed something with fewer lines and more shapes.

The Worm

I tried removing most of his features and adding a tail.

The tail makes him look like you could wave him around like the steam that comes out of a humidifier. The silhouette definitely would have read well at a smaller size too, so I rendered and animated it. And added horns.

Stop writing that tweet, I didn’t whitewash him. The way art programs work is when you want something to glow, it does some mathematical backflips and calculates how your chosen colours would affect each other. The problem is it only works inside the app, so if the drawing was exported and put into a game engine, it wouldn’t give a cool purple glow, it would just look like a purple worm. The glow needs to be added afterwards.

This design was okay, but I knew it could be better. The lack of details was cute, but I felt it dehumanised the character a bit. I wasn’t sure if people would empathise with this wriggly worm thing.

Adding Legs

I figured that more distinguishable features and clothes would make the design more memorable, and it would match the main character better. The question now was how to execute that? From looking at pictures, it seemed the brightest part of a glowing object is usually white, so I tried drawing the character in greyscale and adding a glow effect on top.

…But the colours looked washed out, so I tried using purple as a base instead.

(See how the shoes are a darker colour than the pants? They need to be like that in order for you to tell where they are.)

It was looking nice, but I was worried that it would look too flat next to everything else.

Adding Volume

To add more volume, I took what he would look like if he was alive:

…and put the shadows on his ghost form.

Ta-daa!

(And look, the shoes are the exact same colours as the pants: light purple and dark purple. In fact, most of the body only uses these two colours. Interesting how you can use fewer colours once you add shadows, right?)

The design is likely to change even more when it gets implemented in the game. I’ll probably add a more intense glow, for example.

In the meantime, what impression do you get from this ghost? What do you think his story will be?

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