I did a quick little posing with my scout as an example for this. Nothing too fancy, just some simple lighting and a fun pose!

Now what I normally do with this is use greenscreen model in SFM to only have JUST my character because it'll be easier to select them in an art program like Procreate or Photoshop. Sometimes I will do both a shot with the character in the greenscreened background and then a normal background like say Badwater behind it and take seperate shots of them both to later edit!



(Edit; instead of greenscreen, doing a paintable screen or a white screen is also helpful depending on things like hair and certain materials. This video by CozyChicken explains it better here, actually!
)

Whatever program you prefer to use like Procreate or Photoshop, select all of the greensceen off and away from your charater. You can use the lasso tool, an automatic select brush, whatever feels right for you! I took mine away and it made it so much easier to do the white outline around my scout. I made the background yellow since it's my favorite color haha! It doesn't have to be perfect so don't be worried if the outline is messy.

This may be a little tricky to mess with at first, especially if you haven't really used things like this before, but it isn't as scary as it looks when you are doin it!

First things first, make everything grayscale.


Second, duplicate the same image and make the image on top under the layer filter setting 'Hard Mix'.


Looks wonky, right? Hard Mix ususally is there to really show off the extreme darkness and light on something!

Now, it's up to you how much you do it, but try messing around with the opactiy of the Hard Mix layer. For me, I did 20%!


I use Hard Mix to kinda show more of the shadows for some things, especially when SFM frustrates me sometimes with the lighting and effects. Kinda adds mmph!

This next step is Mainly for Procreate Users!

Now this may be for procreate users only, but! If you use anything else, you can use halftone brushes around the edges of the bold shadows to still do that look! I do that sometimes, but I mainly use Procreate's built in Halftone setting. Sorry if you don't have that, I can make an addition to this if you don't use it!

What I do is select the shadows I like and copy/paste, make it black, and then use Gaussian blur. Sometimes I even draw over parts and do some touch up just because!


Then with Procreate's built in halftone setting, choose whatever you'd like as your tone! I personally use Newspaper the most.

After you have done the halftone to your liking, you can either set it to overlay above your original character image, or color! I think it just depends on what you're going for and what you are doing color wise.


You can do coloring however you want or normally do, but I usually just mess around with either gradient maps, layer settings, curves, all of that! Here, I did both a gradient map with some layer editing to my liking.


I also did the same thing for the shadow with the halftones from before with the drop shadow to really make things pop, too!


Now to really add to that paper feel, we need some textures. While sometimes I do take my own pictures of textures, I mostly use places like https://texturelabs.org/ for that! Paper, metal, paint, sand, you name it and they have it. Go crazy here! Whether it's overlay, soft light, screen, just mess around with layer settings and see what you like.

What I did above there was an overlay of the same newpaper article on both the white outline and scout separately.

For nearing the end, I just did a simple texture for the background and some funky font for this piece since I kept the background fairly simple.


You can overlay multiple textures, mess with any colors you like, whatever you're feelin like the piece itself should feel like really! Again, sites like Texture Labs (https://texturelabs.org/) are really good for this kinda thing and I love the site so much for it. You can even find halftone textures there too if you'd like to mess around with that!

Well, that's it for this guide here! If there's anything like questions or more you guys wanna see/how to make with this kinda look, just ask me!

I am fairly new to this myself as I am experimenting with this sort of style still, but I am havin a lot of fun with it. Plus hearing the nice things everyone's been sayin about it as well as wanting to know how to do it made me wanna make this!

I shall see you all around :D

- DrawSumi