Colour, Shading and Lines

OK last time I talked a little about creating isometric shapes using pixel art, Now I’m going to show you how to colour your images.

Colour

It is important to take time and care when choosing your colours. Having a program which offers a customisable palette also helps.

It is often good practice to use mid tones rather than strong neon colours. This gives your art a more realistic and less cartoony feel.

As you can see here, the top line of colours are all harsh, bright neon colours, whereas the bottom colours are more pleasing to the eye and much more realistic.

Shading

Shading is a vital and often time consuming task needed to make any type of art realistic, and pixel art is no different.

The first thing to do when shading your art is invariably to establish you light source.

When shading a simple flat sided shape like a cube, all you have to do is to use a single colour for each side, with the shades varying with the amount of light which that particular plane receives.

Shading other shapes is a lot more difficult but the important thing to remember is that you know where your light source is and you stick to it.

Just remember – Planes facing the light will be exposed to more light and therefore be a lighter shade and planes facing away from the light will not be exposed to as much light and so will be darker.

Another technique used in the shading of pixel art is dithering, dithering is a technique used by artists with limited palettes.

Gradient

Dithering

The Gradient image uses over 100 colours and the Dithered image only uses 2 so you can see how this technique can be extremely useful if you have a limited palette, it also gives an image an awesome retro feel.

Here is an example of how Dithering can be used in an image.

I’ve used a cylinder but any shape can be dithered, it’s a lot of fun, just give it a try!

Softening Outlines

You may have noticed that a lot of black lines are used in pixel art; the problem with black lines is that they are very harsh and unrealistic. Therefore artists tend to soften the lines in their images to make them less cartoony and more pleasing to the eye.

This cube has been made using entirely black lines.

As you can see it doesn’t look very real and would look very out of place if it was put into another image.

This cube features softer outlines.

This cube is much more aesthetically pleasing, I have used an outline slightly darker than the darkest shade on the image, and for the interior lines I have used a colour slightly lighter than the shade on the top face. I have also used a few pixels of an even lighter colour on the corner to give the image a bit of a shine and add to the overall image.

In the final tutorial i am going to show you how all these techniques can be used to create an awesome final piece of art!