# Cel Shading (セルシェーディング) — image generation prompt
# IndexStyle No.587 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/cel-shading
# Style descriptors only. This prompt names no artist, studio, brand or work.

Produce four original images in the visual language of Cel Shading, a technique from Digital Image Techniques, 1990s–.

## What to make

Make the kind of thing this style exists for: giving 3D games and animation a readable drawn surface, or clarifying complex forms in diagrams and interactive exhibits. Choose one subject and hold it across all four images.

## What has to be visible

- Shadow split into two or three flat values
- Strong outer and crease contours
- Uniform color planes with restrained reflections
- Three-dimensional motion beneath a drawn surface

Someone who knows this style should be able to point at each of these in the finished image.

## How to build it

- Layout and structure: Choose an angle where silhouette and light-dark plane division remain clear
- Type and lettering: Use headlines as strong as the contours and move small copy onto a flat field
- Material and surface: Quantize diffuse light to two to four bands, suppress reflection and draw only necessary silhouette and crease lines
- Colour: #F2D7A7 carries the ground, #E65D4F is the colour the style is remembered by, #25213A holds text and outlines. Read off real works, so treat them as a direction rather than a fixed palette.
- What it should feel like: play, technique, exhilaration

## What goes wrong

An outline around ordinary 3D shading is not cel shading. The lighting itself must become discrete planes.

## Across the four

Keep every cue above present in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows the range this style covers rather than four versions of one picture.

## Constraints

- Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work.
- Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work.
- Produce original compositions in the general period language described above.

Full design spec: https://indexstyle.org/styles/cel-shading/design.md