Unoptimized Specs

Original DA Upload Date: September 19, 2021

The ability to spec does not make you intelligent… even when dealing with other speccies.

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Gilda is a big-nosed blonde nerd on the autism spectrum. Nicole is a big-nosed blonde nerd on the autism spectrum. What could possibly go wrong when these two communicate with each other?

…quite a lot, actually. Gilda’s not very good at understanding all the little details of what others say, and Nicole’s not very good at speaking. And this can lead to some misunderstandings between the two, that end up getting each other frustrated with the other. And themselves. Like here, when Gilda misunderstands what Nicole wants for her suit, due to her not being specific enough. Nicole’s continued reluctance to speak results in the two twinning, which was not what the Wyler sister wanted.

I drew this piece as a way of illustrating my experiences with people on the autism spectrum. As a speccie myself, I often times find it awkward interacting with others on the spectrum. Specifically because autism is, well, a spectrum. I misunderstand what people on the spectrum mean or are doing, other people on the spectrum have misunderstood me. And because of that, it’s often been frustrating trying to interact with them, especially because it’s unpredictable how they’re going to act because of the misunderstanding. I know people are frustrated with me when I misunderstand something, even for others on the spectrum. So I drew this as a way of illustrating that autism struggle, with Gilda Grime and Nicole Wyler, two of my characters who are on the autism spectrum.

Now to the production of piece!

If you zoom way into the piece, you’ll notice that everything is dithered. That is, pixels of various different colors are used to simulate colors that aren’t natively possible. If you’re viewing this image, you’re viewing it on a monitor with a 24-bit color display. That is, a monitor that uses 8 bits, or 256 values, each for red, green, and blue, to create its color palette. That’s 256^3 colors, or, written out as an integer, 16,777,216. To put that into perspective, that number is bigger than the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, combined (as of the 2020 US census). However, as strange as it may sound, even 24-bit displays have their limits. And I’ve somehow managed to push them myself; whenever there’s complex lighting happening in my artwork, say, a glowing effect, it often creates what I like to call a ‘halo effect’, that is, rounded color banding that is distractingly visible when viewed at full resolution.

Dithering is a way of masking color banding, and also artificially creating detail. And it’s used on basically everything in this piece that isn’t Gilda or Nicole. And the panel of Gilda polishing Nicole’s shoes even has it on them, by mistake because I didn’t think to dither the background on it until partway through. In some cases, the dithering only made the scenery look blurry, however, in the case of the lighting on the couch in the first two panels and the sunlight in the last two, it drastically reduced and even eliminated any evidence of color banding. I’d give my compliments to the curtain, too, but… let’s pretend those accidentally erased shadows aren’t visible.

As for what it did for the textures, the gritty texture of the wall looks better than usual, in my opinion, thanks to the simulated detail. I think I’m gonna use this technique for detail when the situation calls for it.

So… how did I create this dithering effect, you may be asking? Well, that’s easy. I made two copies of the background, applied a checkerboard mask to the top copy of the background, offset the masked copy by a few pixels, applied a ‘dissolve’ effect at 50% opacity, and then finally, merged the two layers and scaled it by the same amount the top layer was offset by, with the resulting anti-aliasing further masking any obvious color banding.

That’s how you use anti-aliasing as a tool, people.

Anyways, that’ll be all for this one. Until next time, take care.

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Grunvale is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it, as long as you link me to it.
Panels 1, 2, 7, and 8 of this artwork were made at a resolution of 5076×2160 (aspect ratio 2.35:1); panels 3-6 were made at a resolution of 2538×2160 (aspect ratio 1.18:1).