Anime-style portrait commission guide: cell-shaded vs painterly anime

Tomasz emailed me on a Sunday in January asking for an anime-style portrait of his D&D bard. He sent three reference images. The first was Violet Evergarden — clean cell-shaded line, flat blocks of colour, sharp graphic shadow. The second was a Genshin Impact splash art — painterly anime, no visible line, soft gradients, almost like a digital painterly portrait of an anime character. The third was a Studio Ghibli still — somewhere in between. He said "I want it in this style," meaning all three. I had to write back and ask him to pick one, because those three references describe three very different paintings.

I'm Hector. I run Design Vortex, and "anime" is the single most ambiguous style word a client can use in a brief. It's not one style. It's at least two distinct painting approaches with very different brush economies, and the gap between them is where most anime commissions go sideways. This piece is the long version of the conversation I have with every anime client in the first email exchange.

If you haven't picked between Souls and anime yet, the wider souls and anime fan-art commission guide is the starting point. Come back here when you've decided you want anime specifically.

Table of contents

• The two anime styles clients ask for
• Cell-shaded anime: the painter's economy
• Painterly anime: closer to oil painting than you think
• Which one is right for which project
• How to brief the style you actually want
• References: the test that separates the two
• Common mistakes and how to head them off
• Where to take it next

The two anime styles clients ask for

When a client says "anime," they almost always mean one of two things. The whole job of the first email is to figure out which.

The two flavours, plainly:

1. Cell-shaded anime — the look you associate with most TV anime, manga colour pages, and a lot of mobile-game key art before HoYoverse changed the register. Clean black line on top, flat blocks of colour underneath, hard-edged shadow shapes in two or three values, very little gradient. Sharp, graphic, immediately legible.
2. Painterly anime — the look HoYoverse codified with Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, and that artists like Krenz Cushart and Wlop work in. Anime proportions and face geometry, but rendered with soft gradients, no visible line in most areas, painterly brushwork on cloth and skin. Closer to oil painting than to manga.

These two registers don't blend cleanly. Clients who send a cell-shaded reference and a painterly reference in the same brief are asking for two paintings. We have to pick one before the sketch starts.

The third register that sometimes comes up is Ghibli / hand-drawn film animation, which is its own thing — softer line, watercolour-leaning palette, more atmospheric. We can paint in it, but it's a different conversation. For most commissions, the cell-shaded versus painterly choice is the one that matters.

Cell-shaded anime: the painter's economy

Cell-shaded anime is the most economical painting register I work in. That sounds technical — it means the painter spends very few hours per square inch of canvas, because the style asks for clarity, not rendering. Cell-shaded is fast because the decisions are mostly about line and value.

What the painter does:

• Draws a clean line in dark brown or black, varying line weight (thicker at silhouette and shadow contours, thinner inside the form). The line is the painting's spine and it stays visible in the final.
• Blocks flat colour under the line in two-to-four values per area — base, shadow, sometimes a highlight, sometimes a deep shadow. No gradient in the shadow. The transition is hard-edged.
• Adds graphic shadow shapes rather than rendering form. A nose has a single shadow shape on one side, not a gradient. Cloth has two or three shadow shapes, not a continuous fall-off.
• Uses one or two highlight points — eye catchlights, hair edge-light, a metal rim — and that's the whole rendering pass.

What this means for the brief: cell-shaded reads cleanly at any size. It's the right choice for VTT tokens (clean line survives at 200×200 pixels), for character sheets, for prints meant to look graphic and bold. The VTT token piece covers why clean line matters at small scale.

What this means for the client: cell-shaded is usually the less expensive option per portrait, and it ships faster. Mei commissioned three party portraits in cell-shaded register in November; we shipped all three in nine days total. The same three portraits in painterly anime would have been four weeks.

Painterly anime: closer to oil painting than you think

Painterly anime is the most-requested register in 2026 because the HoYoverse games have set the visual expectation. Clients see Ganyu's splash art or Acheron's character intro and want their OC in the same register. That's a fair ask, and it's a different job from cell-shaded.

What the painter does:

• Draws an underdrawing that mostly gets buried under paint. The line might survive faintly at hair contours and eyelashes; everywhere else, it's gone by the final.
• Builds colour in glazes and soft transitions — skin has a gradient from light to shadow, not a flat block. Cloth has a sheen, a fall-off, sometimes a subsurface warmth where the light passes through thin fabric.
• Renders metal and fabric tightly — the gold on an armour piece reads as actual gold, with the highlight and the warmth bouncing into the shadow. This is the half of the style that takes the most hours.
• Keeps the face anime-proportioned — big eyes, small mouth, slight chin, anime nose convention — but paints it with realistic skin texture. The face is the place where the two halves of the style meet.

The brief implication: painterly anime takes around twice the painting hours of cell-shaded for the same scope. The character art commission pricing piece has the actual numbers; the general rule is that painterly anime sits at the higher end of my pricing because the rendering hours add up. The character art process piece walks through what those hours actually go into.

Cell-shaded is a line-first painting. Painterly anime is a value-first painting. The brief you write should follow.

Which one is right for which project

Most clients don't know which register they want — they know which mood board they like, and the mood board is usually a mix. Here's the decision matrix I walk people through in email.

Pick cell-shaded if:

• You want a VTT token first and a print second. Clean line survives shrinking.
• You're commissioning a party of four or more and the budget per portrait matters.
• You want the portrait to feel graphic, bold, and immediately readable on social media.
• Your character has a strong silhouette and you want the silhouette to be the read.
• You like classic TV anime, manga colour pages, or pre-2018 mobile-game art.

Pick painterly anime if:

• You want a single hero portrait that prints at A3 or larger.
• Your reference set is mostly Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, or HoYoverse-adjacent.
• You want the gold trim, the fabric drape, the metal sheen to actually look like the material.
• You're commissioning fan art of a HoYoverse character — the canon style is painterly, and a cell-shaded version will read as off-model.
• You prefer the look of Krenz, Wlop, or the modern key-art register over classic TV anime.

Probably ask for both: clients who want a print and a VTT token of the same character. We can deliver a painterly hero portrait and a separate cell-shaded token in the same commission — that's actually a common request, and it gives you the right tool for each surface. The VTT tokens vs portraits piece covers when you need both.

How to brief the style you actually want

The brief for an anime portrait has the same skeleton as any character commission brief, with one extra section at the top: the register declaration.

The structure I recommend:

1. Register: one sentence — "Painterly anime, Genshin-leaning, no visible line in the final." Or: "Cell-shaded, clean line, two-value shadow blocks, no gradient on skin."
2. One-line pitch — 15 words or fewer about who the character is.
3. Anime face conventions — which sub-register of anime face. "Big-eyed Genshin face," "more grounded Studio Bones face," "stylized Trigger angular face." Be specific.
4. Skin, hair, eyes — same as any portrait brief. Anime hair tolerates wider colour vocabulary (pink, mint, lavender are all on the table without explanation needed).
5. Outfit and visible gear — anime tolerates more decorative ornament than Souls or modern register. List the elements you actually want; if you want HoYoverse-style trim everywhere, say so.
6. Mood and lighting — anime lighting has its own conventions; "anime golden hour" reads warmer and softer than photographic golden hour. Just name the mood.
7. Crop and pose — same as any brief. Anime tolerates more dynamic poses than Souls does.
8. References — three to five, all in the SAME register. If you send a cell-shaded reference and a painterly reference, I'll ask you to pick.

The piece on how to write a commission brief is the genre-neutral starting point if you've never written one before. The fantasy brief piece covers the underlying logic in more depth.

References: the test that separates the two

The fastest way to tell which register your reference set is in: pick one image and look at the skin shadow.

• If the shadow on the cheek is a single flat shape with a hard edge between light and shadow — you're looking at cell-shaded.
• If the shadow on the cheek is a soft gradient that gets warmer or cooler as it goes — you're looking at painterly.

Run that test on every reference in your mood board. If three out of four pass the "hard edge" test and one is "soft gradient," your mood board is cell-shaded with one outlier. Cut the outlier or move it to a "lighting reference only" note.

The second test: look at the hair.

• Cell-shaded hair has a few clearly drawn strand-groups, each with a flat colour and a flat highlight stripe.
• Painterly hair has a continuous gradient with the highlight pooling on the topmost surfaces and the shadow falling off into the neck.

If your references disagree on hair, they disagree on style. Pick the version you actually want and discard the others.

Yusra sent me a mood board of fifteen references in March. Eleven were cell-shaded, four were painterly. She thought she wanted painterly because that's what she said first. After we ran the shadow and hair tests, it was clear she actually wanted cell-shaded with painterly hair — a hybrid that doesn't really exist as a clean style. We ended up cell-shaded with one extra rendering pass on the hair only. That portrait is on her wall now.

Common mistakes and how to head them off

Six failure modes I now ask about before the sketch starts:

1. Mixed mood boards. Cell-shaded plus painterly plus Ghibli is three projects. We pick one.
2. "Anime style" with realistic body proportions. Anime is a stylization that includes the body, not just the face. A realistically-proportioned body with an anime face reads as uncanny. We commit to the style top to bottom.
3. HoYoverse character fan art in cell-shaded register. The HoYoverse canon style is painterly. A cell-shaded Raiden Shogun reads as off-model fan art rather than tribute. The Genshin and Honkai commission piece covers this in more depth.
4. Western face geometry under anime line. If the brief asks for "anime style" but the face reference is a Western actor, we'll need to anime-ify the face (bigger eyes, smaller mouth, simplified nose). Some clients don't realise that's part of the deal.
5. Too much costume in cell-shaded. Cell-shaded works because it's graphic. Twenty pieces of ornate trim in cell-shaded becomes visual noise. Painterly tolerates more ornament because the rendering carries it.
6. Lighting that fights the style. Cell-shaded with photographic dramatic lighting reads strange — the style expects flatter, more graphic light. Painterly with cell-shaded-style flat shadow looks unfinished. Match the lighting to the register.

I head these off in the first email, not at sketch review.

Where to take it next

If you've got an anime portrait sitting on the back burner, the order form is the fastest way to get a brief in front of me — please include one register declaration sentence at the top so I know which lane to start sketching in. The portfolio has both cell-shaded and painterly anime sections; spending three minutes there will tell you faster than another mood board which register you actually want.

If you're commissioning a HoYoverse character specifically, the Genshin and Honkai commission piece is the right next read. If your character is your own OC dropped into an anime register, the fan art vs original character piece covers the brief for that. And if you're commissioning anything based on a copyrighted property, please read the commercial licensing piece and the fan art IP piece before the commission starts — those conversations are easier up front than late.

Either way, write the one-line register declaration before you write anything else. That sentence saves a week.