How to make a cape from your skin's own colours

Starting a cape on an empty canvas is why so many end up as a logo on a rectangle. Starting from the skin's palette gives you a cape that matches by construction, and it is a faster way to work: the hard decision - which colours - is already made.

6 steps · about 30 minutes

1. Lift the palette off the skin

   Open your skin in the editor and note the five or six colours it really uses. Write the hex values down - you are going to use exactly these and nothing else.

2. Set the ground first

   Open the cape maker and fill the whole panel with your skin's darkest colour. Working dark-to-light means every later stroke reads as an addition, and a cape with a dark ground sits better against a lit world than one with a bright one.

3. Put one shape in the middle third

   The cape hangs from the shoulders and the bottom is often behind legs or hidden by movement. Anything you want seen belongs in the middle third of the panel.

   Only a ten-by-sixteen patch actually faces outward - 160 pixels all in - so it holds one shape, not a scene.

4. Use the accent once

   One accent colour, in one place. Two accents on 160 pixels reads as noise at the size this is actually seen.

5. Fill the edges from the art

   A cape is a box: leave the side, top and bottom strips transparent and it looks see-through the moment it swings. Sample the colour the design already ends on.

   The cape maker fills the strips for you. If you are drawing elsewhere, the converter will do it from a finished face.

6. Look at it on the character, not on the canvas

   Save it, then load skin and cape together in the try-on tool. Nearly every design needs one value pushed after seeing it at real size on a moving model.