Helm, despite your insistence on selout being dead, you seem to have employed some sort of bastard child almagation of selout, colored outlines, and anti-aliasing. It's blowing my mind.
Not really. I break outlines sometimes, and indeed I AA. But none of these is what you devil worshippers once deducted from studying chun-li's thighs from street fighter 2.
I'm so happy they didn't selout me too much by 1997!! Selout, as mentioned above, is darkening the contours of a shape towards a middle shade so it'll read well on any sort of background. In action, most people who read the tutorial and went 'oh, selout, good, I'll use that!' selout
to motherfuckin' black (like PoV here.)
mmfdgfmght ggrfghghytty gghtw!!!I whine less when people apply selout sparingly, and towards a true middle shade (about 120 lightness, people!) though still, it makes everything look like it's a cardboard cutout for me.
I feel natural light, highlights, shadows and absolutely, more saturation on sprites against less saturated backgrounds are always enough to read the action, and studying art by *any game company but capcom* seems to reinforce my point of view.