Drillimation to Release PC-98 Touhou Art Tutorial on Wednesday

The PC-98 Touhou Project games have become cult favorites among western gamers, and fans have pieced together their own artworks inspired by that game’s art style. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many tutorials on how to imitate the style. This is the problem Drillimation Systems will set out to solve on Wednesday with the release of a dedicated tutorial on how to imitate such art style.

Even if you think the PC-98 style was created by ZUN, you may be mistaken. Because he was rookie at the time of their creation, he took influence from various games’ art directions, leading to a lot of inconsistencies between all five games. The first three have the majority of inconsistencies as well as discrepancies for the artworks in each of the playable characters in The Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dreams.

The fourth and fifth games have less inconsistencies, but there has been no agreed upon style. Many have argued the PC-98 art direction shouldn’t be actual Touhou art because of these asset slips.

Recommended Pipeline for PC-98 Touhou-style Art

PC-98 Touhou-style art is always done in pixel art. You can use any program you wish such as MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop, but I will be using Paint.NET for more control. Below are the pros and cons for each of the programs I mentioned:

Program	Pros	Cons
Microsoft Paint	Recommended for beginners and is preinstalled on most computers	No transparency or layering
Paint.NET	Recommended for amateurs, includes layering and transparency, as well as built-in patterns for creating more elaborate art	No path feature included without using plugins
Adobe Photoshop	Recommended for experts, includes advanced features for both pixel and anti-aliased art, pen feature can be used for creating paths	Patterns must be pre-defined, bucket tool can create anti-aliased effects

The pipeline for the direction goes as follows:

• Lineart should be a one-pixel black pen.
• For coloring and shading, you will need to use two colors (or three for hair). Dithering is optional.

Keep effects to a minimum until you actually know how to use them. If you want to do Perlin or Simplex noise, use the Noise effect in Paint.NET and quantize the colors.

Further reading

This article does not cover the art directions for the games released from Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil onwards. Emiko Hosokawa of Studio Emiko has released her own tutorial on her DeviantArt page, which you can read here.