do you have any tips on replicating the ace attorney art style for sprites and stuff? You do it so well! (I’m thinking like what brushes you use, proportions, that kind of thing)
I've been sitting on this ask for a while because I kind of wanted to answer it in-depth, so sorry for taking so long, Anon! The "Ace Attorney art style" isn't really one single thing. I'll try and answer this as thoroughly as I can, but I think the most important thing to do when replicating a style is to get really into it and have references up for whatever you're trying to do instead of playing by hard and fast rules! In context, (and very broadly speaking) Ace Attorney's original art is a fairly standard deviation from the "Capcom" art style. So, I'd like to start there! Pre-AA (and contemporary with AA1), some of the AA style quirks are definitely identifiable in other Capcom series. For example, Here's Ikeno Daigo's cover art for Street Fighter III 3rd STRIKE (1999), and what I think is a 1998 Ryu piece. (Side note: it's these silly illustrations of the characters doing things like their laundry that make Capcom characters so special to me! There's a fair bit of older AA art like this too, and I really wish they still did it for the aa5-6 cast!)
I think Street Fighter designs have a lot of common DNA with AA designs, particularly facially. (There's even a sketch by Iwamoto on Carmelo Gusto's design page that's just Ryu in a chef's hat!)
I think a decent chunk of the SF similarities can be attributed to prolific Capcom official artist Edayan (Shin'ya Edaki) drawing more official art than most people realise. (From what I can tell, from JFA-AJ, a lot of the promo art and character renders are his handiwork. It gets harder to differentiate as time goes on...) Here's a 1996 poster for Street Fighter EX, where you can hopefully see where I'm coming from!
Comparing it to Kumiko Suekane's comic art in Investigate Into the TRUTH (2005), there's definitely some carry-over, except the AA characters don't look quite so tough. (I always think Mia looks a lot like Chun-Li though.)
One of the artists who most people will think of when they hear AA art style is Tatsuro Iwamoto, who did the bulk of the character designs for JFA, T&T, and both AAI games, as well as a few designs in AA1. I always think the most characteristic thing in his work is how angular everything looks! When he draws men, they tend to have clearer bone structure than other AA illustrators. (A lot of the women have the same big almond eye shape and cute proportions...)
From a technical standpoint, I think Iwamoto is probably the best AA official artist, though I do personally prefer the more wide, kind of squishy feel of the original game. These are his work, and you can see the spikiness of it.
Onto actually drawing like this, taking Mia as an example, her official art varies massively. I've drawn her at the side mostly based on the style Suekane used for her first render. She has generally fairly realistic proportions (albeit with very long legs, and a small head) and, on the whole, this is how AA characters are built. Usually they have pretty big hands too, because one of the most important things about AA is that big OBJECTION! point!
Fatter characters usually have less jawline definition, but a little chin bump, which you can see on Delicia Scone, Bikini and Marvin Grossberg. I'd really recommend doing real studies of real people of all shapes and sizes to get better at drawing cartoony characters, because all of this stylisation is based on observation, and being able to draw diversely is a great skill that I think all artists should hone.
One of the biggest things about trilogy characters is that, by and large, you can usually tell who they are by their eye shape, because they're all really distinct. Packing personality into your eyes is a super key part of drawing in... any style that focuses on emotive humans, really, but particularly in these anime and anime-adjacent styles. Take the cast of RFTA, for example, in their default portraits, as designed by Kazuya Nuri:
You can tell a lot about the personalities of each character by how they hold their face: Ema has big, wide eyes, and she's a curious character who likes to observe things. Gant and Darke have crazy eyes and a slackness at the base of them that makes them seem dangerous. (And more similar than Gant would like to acknowledge!) Bruce looks like a puppy, so you know he's just a simple guy. Angel has two distinct personalities that she wants to present, so she has very different ways of holding her face. Mike is skittish and comedic, so he has cartoon eyes that always look wide open. Jake and Angel both have a slight droop to their eyes, so they look tired. There's a lot you can read from little pieces of a design, so when drawing for yourself, you should consider how a character would hold their face, as well as what that face actually looks like. Most of the cast have a simple nose made up from a line and a nostril, but more chiseled/handsome/older characters often have more detail on their nose. (Sorry, Edgeworth, for the purposes of this demonstration, you're not the handsome one.) Usually these are Iwamoto drawings, and you can see that when Iwamoto half-redesigned Edgeworth for AAI, he's a bit better looking! Really, there are a lot of different AA nose shapes, so your best bet is just looking at real noses and trying to stylise them in a way that fits in with the rest of the face.
Usually, the brow to cheek to jaw line from the 3/4 view that's very common in AA art is a lot more vertical than you'd think, especially in the men. Iwamoto tends to include a subtle jowl bump, though, and the chin usually goes in before it goes out. As far as brushes are concerned... For the Mia above, I used a lineart brush called "Funny Haha" which you can find for Procreate by searching just that. For the shading (I know it's not in colour, but I'd use the same brush for rendering that too!) it's one by Deharme from their 2017 pack (and you'll be able to find it by searching Deharme 2017). For these character splash arts for my RFTA zine, I used a different Deharme oil brush for everything, from the sketch to the rendering, and really, I can't recommend this set enough.
When colouring, there's usually a lot of soft incidental lighting that makes things look a bit more 3D and solid in what is otherwise quite a flat style. (Like on Gant's chest.) Having a look at where there are hard shadows and lights versus softer ones can really make things look more legit, and a lot better in their own right. Clothing folds, particularly for suits (which are a hard thing to draw!) are a huge part of AA characters, so it's worth studying how they work in game and in real life. Don't ever be afraid of pulling up a photo reference, because a lot of the time it'll look more game-accurate than if you tried to cobble it together from game art.
This is the same brush. I always think Iwamoto is more of a line artist, and Nuri is a painter. You can kind of tell what each process is like from the artbook scans, so you should look at those. (You can find them online!)
Sprite-wise, if it's OG style pixelated sprites you're interested in, I'd have to point you to spacecoyote's Neil sprite set - from 2008, but I think it's still one of the best resources out there! Nina does a great job of making it accessible, and that was pretty much the same process that I followed when doing this cut-in mockup for Lana.
The HD sprites are a bit more approachable, because really, they're just standard illustrations. (and they're only waist-up!) I was lucky when I was spriting Lana à la Investigations, because Calisto was a reasonable reference for her coat, and Ema was great for her face. AAI sprite lineart is super crisp, comparitively, I think.
I've hit the image limit for this post now. Hopefully it helped! It's a little all over the place. Really, my biggest advice for drawing like AA is to do more studies of both real life and AA art.
