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Lineless describes an art style with two key features, notably lacking line art — particularly outlines around objects or characters — and that different parts of the image are differentiated by using flat areas of tone and colour rather than detailed soft shading. Art in this style is often heavily stylized and brightly coloured.

Important Note:

this tag should NOT be applied to paintings with complex soft shading and/or realistic rendering — use digital painting (artwork), photorealism, and/or soft shading instead

In some cases, lineless art may have gradients, textures, overlaid effects, or simple hard cel shading or "airbrushed" soft shading to convey more complex lighting, without losing the overall visual simplicity of the style. Some images in this style may not be truly lineless, with some lines appearing as edges between similarly coloured areas (e.g. defining individual fingers on a hand), or to add small details (e.g. the character's closed mouth, eyelashes)

Related Tags

• flat colors - many lineless images resemble a flat coloured image without lines, and can be described as having flat colours themselves
• colored line art - lineless images may feature limited coloured line art
• gouache (artwork) - a type of paint popularly used to create lineless style artwork traditionally

See also

• tag group:art