The style in one sentence
A saturated, painterly comic-book world lit by fire and gas: boldly drawn characters with exaggerated faces, set in smoky, glowing places.
Look
- Medium: a saturated comic-book illustration, painterly on characters and places, simpler on objects (thinner outline, softer and flatter colour); never photographic, never anime, never flat vector clip-art.
- Framing: characters are mid-action or posed heroically, waist-up to full body; places are wide, with a clear focal point and city or industrial depth behind; objects sit in their environment, not on white.
- Gas as a motif: most scenes have visible gas: fiery-orange clouds for MassHole and Fartlantic City, toxic-green fog and glowing green vats for Lord Putrid and the League of Pungency, warm tan and brown billows for Uranus.
- Humor: exaggerated faces and proportions, deadpan staging of absurd things (a burrito bar on a bomber, a yellow ad billboard).
Line
- Most heroes are inked with a dark outline that varies in weight, with a few hatch lines in the shading (FartMan, Fart Smeller, Burrito Bandit).
- Objects get a thinner outline over flatter colour (The Pressurizer, Mega Stink Bomb).
- Some characters are painted without a strong outline and are shaped by light alone (Lord Putrid, Skull Puker, Mr. Malodor, Captain Gassious, Flatulent Fiend).
- Measured over the approved pictures, shrunk to 64 px, the pixels darker than 18% brightness (ink and deep shadow) cover a median 4.8% of a character picture, 1.3% of a place and 0.7% of a thing.
Shadow
- Shadow is painted, not flat: soft gradients that turn darker and more saturated toward the core (FartMan's cape, Flatulent Fiend's coveralls).
- Many faces and clothes carry fine cross-hatching (Fart Smeller, Burt, Joe Plumber).
- An object on the ground throws a soft shadow there; Mega Stink Bomb hovers over an ordinary street with its own soft shadow below.
Highlights and rim light
- In fire and gas scenes, characters are edge-lit by what is behind them: orange rim light on FartMan's cape and hair, green on Flatulent Fiend, a golden sheen on Captain Gassious's armour.
- Glowing eyes and glowing vats are among the brightest points in a villain's picture (Lord Putrid's red-orange eyes, Flatulent Fiend's green vats).
Palette
| role | colors |
|---|---|
| FartMan | green top, red vest, orange-and-purple cape, purple gloves, teal trousers, yellow boots, orange rocket-flame trail |
| MassHole | saturated orange skin, fiery orange-red hair, black belt |
| Lord Putrid / League of Pungency | toxic neon green glow, black hooded cloak, pale green face, red-orange glowing eyes |
| The Silent One | black suit with purple panels and boots, a dark face mask; teal-grey city, pale lilac gas |
| Uranus | tan or blue-grey planet, dark or purple sky, tan and brown billows |
| Cities | warm dusk skies (teal to orange), glass towers, orange smoke |
Proportions
- Most cartoon heroes and villains have enlarged faces: wide grins, bulging or narrowed eyes (FartMan, Fart Smeller, Burrito Bandit); Burt, Joe Plumber and Captain Gassious keep realistic proportions.
- Heroes and brutes have broad shoulders and chests (Captain Gassious, MassHole, Skull Puker); a scheming villain is drawn small and round (Mr. Malodor behind his StenchCo desk).
- Some objects and planets get a simple face of two eyes and a mouth line (Mega Stink Bomb, The Windy Cyclone, Uranus Blast).
Measured colour
Share of the strongly coloured pixels (saturation above 0.4, brightness above 0.3) across all 166 approved pictures, by hue family. The average colour is of every pixel in the family, shaded as well as lit, so the lit colours are brighter than these.
| hue family | share | average colour |
|---|---|---|
| orange (15 to 45 degrees) | 30% | #a8703c |
| blue (200 to 260) | 19% | #426291 |
| green (70 to 165) | 12% | #6c9b4a |
| teal (165 to 200) | 12% | #4b9eb0 |
| yellow (45 to 70) | 9% | #a29b43 |
| red (345 to 15) | 9% | #863832 |
| purple (260 to 330) | 7% | #753f88 |
- A median picture has a mean saturation of 0.4 and a mean brightness of 0.50 for characters, 0.56 for places and 0.62 for things: characters are the darkest, objects the lightest.
Established characters
FartMan: a lean man with glasses in a green top with a red vest, a long orange-and-purple cape, flying through the city.
Fart Smeller: a mustached hero in colorful striped jacket, red gloves, goggles and a metal gas-mask filter.
Flatulent Fiend: a wild-haired man in army-green coveralls and gas mask beside glowing green vats.
MassHole: a muscular orange villain with saturated orange skin, fiery orange-red hair and a black belt. (Cartoon only: never a likeness of any real person.)
Lord Putrid: a hooded figure with a twisted grin and glowing eyes over a green-lit dome.
Mr. Malodor: a round, mustached villain CEO at a desk marked StenchCo, in a brown suit with a red chair.
Burrito Bandit: a sombrero, rainbow poncho and a burrito, sprayed by beans and tacos.
Do and don't
- FartMan: Do catch the character mid-action, with fire or gas behind them and an orange rim light on the edge.
- Windopolis: Do paint a place wide, with one clear focal point (the sunset gap and the tiny hero) and pipes, fans and gas for depth.
- Mega Stink Bomb: Do put an object in an ordinary place: hovering over a street, with its own soft shadow below.
- The Fartiverse: Do keep the gas, even in a gentle world: mint and lilac replace the fire, and the clouds stay.
- Don't leave an object alone on blank white: every object in the art sits in a street, on a cliff, in a desert, in space or in the sky.
- Don't leave the gas out: most pictures carry smoke, fog, clouds or a glow, whatever the colour.
Rules for new art
- No real people's likeness. The faces must read as invented cartoon characters. Satirical figures stay generic and clearly cartoonish.
- No text inside images unless the entity's name is the point; if text is needed, check it renders correctly.
- No AI labels or watermarks.
- Square 1:1, saved as JPEG under design/cast/.