Sumi Backdrops

Sumi Backdrops is a set of 7 background and overlay pieces drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. It contains a full-screen menu backdrop, a seamless pattern tile, a modal dimming overlay, a title banner, a section divider and a loading bar track and fill.

This is the piece most free UI kits leave out entirely. A kit that gives you panels and buttons but nothing to put them on stops being useful at the first screen you build, and the backdrop is the one thing you cannot fake with a flat colour without the whole menu looking unfinished.

The shadow is a single hard-edged shape with no falloff — the defining property of cel shading, and the thing a gradient can never imitate. The outline uses the darkest tone in the palette rather than the border tone, or it reads as a thick grey frame instead of ink.

Inside that style this is the Sumi reading of it: a dark interface on a charcoal wash palette with seal red accents, built around two concentric frames, tab-shaped buttons at 120x48, glossy bars divided into 9 segments, and outlined icons on a 32px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

The backdrop is where an art style has the most room to show itself, so it is drawn differently in each: dithered bands, a triangulated mosaic, hatched paper, an isometric grid, a hard-edged horizon. It ships at 640x360 and exports to 2560x1440 at 4x, which covers 1080p with the aspect held, so it stretches to any resolution with a single cover fit. The pattern tile closes every motif inside its own bounds, so tiling shows no seam.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Sumi family, which means this kit and the Sumi panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered games.

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