The look

  • Saturated primary and secondary colors used at full strength.
  • A hard black contour around the face, hair and collar.
  • Regular printed dots filling the mid tones.
  • Shadow reduced to one flat shape with a crisp edge.
  • A flat background color, often repeated across a grid of panels.

Where it comes from

Pop art emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in America, and Tate describes it as work drawing on imagery from popular and commercial culture: advertising, product packaging and comic books. Part of what it borrowed was a printing process. Cheap color printing built its images out of regular dot screens, and enlarging those dots turned a production artifact into the subject. Tate's entry on comic strip art covers the same move, art that imitates the style, commercial printing techniques and subject matter of comic strips. The portrait version keeps all of it: flat commercial color, hard outline, and dots you are meant to see.

What it suits

  • A bold profile picture that reads at thumbnail size
  • Party and event posters
  • Wall prints laid out in a four-panel grid
  • Band or club merch artwork

How to shoot for it

  • Use hard directional light so the shadow snaps into one clean shape.
  • Shoot tight on the face; the style throws away small detail.
  • Bright clothing helps, since every color is pushed to full strength.
  • A plain wall is ideal, because the background is replaced with flat color anyway.

This look is not in Toonsta today. It is described here so you can recognize it; the closest Toonsta styles are listed below.

Related styles

  • Retro cartoon filter: A retro cartoon filter flattens your photo into the look of television animation: a heavy black outline, a small set of flat colors filled inside it, and almost no shading.
  • Pixel art filter: A pixel art filter rebuilds your photo on a coarse grid, a few hundred squares across at most, using a deliberately small palette.
  • Comic book filter: A comic book filter gives your photo an inked contour, flat printed color inside it, and dot texture through the mid tones.

Sources