Color, shading, and highlight study
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=5867
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 8:26pm
Topic: Color, shading, and highlight study
Posted By: absinthelord
Subject: Color, shading, and highlight study
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 9:13am
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I understand this might be a bit unorthodox, but I think this might be helpful to me in creation of my pieces. My designs seem to do great... I have gotten kudos (or nothing, which is better then negative remarks) on the designs, so I'm staying away from that for the moment. My trouble seems to be with shading, color selection, and highlighting. Here are three simple structures. I've chosen colors, and shaded and highlighted the way that came natural to me. I'd like to see how I might improve upon color selection for base, shading, and so forth... I understand this is hard to explain and is usually sort of intuitive, but if anyone has some tips on how they go about doing this and would like to share, I'd love it. Feel free to edit or use examples.  |
Replies:
Posted By: jalonso
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 12:01pm
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This is a very smart thing of you to do. I shall go home and make my edit and hope many other's do too. Often, learning through visuals is the best way. ------------- |
Posted By: Inventrix
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 1:05pm
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I haven't been around to pick up any sort of edit ettiquette there might be, but I decided to try to help a little anyway, on the colors at least. The main problem that I noticed is that your midtones and highlights are very grey, and that you hueshift toward blue on the highlights. You want it to be the other way around, especially with reds and yellows. Assuming you were going for a nice bright red, the midtones and highlights should really be a slightly orangey red, with a nice pure red or purpley red for the shadows. I tend to like a pure red myself.  For the yellow, you were making the midtones and highlights much too green. You want to start with a bright yellow and then shift towards red in the shadows. Of course, if you wanted a greenish yellow, then you need to make the shadows shift to blue instead of red.  |
Posted By: jalonso
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 1:49pm
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@KiraCatgirl, Your post is a model c+c reply. Welcome :)
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Posted By: absinthelord
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 2:09pm
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So I've adjusted the color of shape one a bit to show more of a pure red. Incidentally, I'd like to hear some thoughts on how some of you decide on the particular colors to use for your piece. Do you choose them before hand? During the work, perhaps? Is it an eyballed choice or is there a kind of formula you follow?  When I look at this piece, something doesn't look quite right about the shading. I've seen other pieces with a beautiful texture to the surface. This piece looks like a few loops of color to me, though I can see the effect that I want to attain, which is a nice smooth transition of shades. This is where I tried dithering to loose the loops:  I've also tried this to show a bit of texture so the thing doesn't look so reflective. This has not met with the best reaction with other projects, however. Comments and suggestions? Oh, and happy birthday, by the way! |
Posted By: Inventrix
Date Posted: 17 January 2008 at 2:50pm
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Thank you absinthe! And jalonso, although for a different reason. :D As for picking colors, I usually have an idea of the basic colors I want the diffferent elements in the picture to be, and then go from that color to the highlight and shadow colors on that element to get basic colors. From there I alter the colors a little bit at a time fairly frequently while working, as I get a better idea of how the colors work in the picture itself. I actually have a WIP thread (the dragon hatchling one) where you can see the process yourself ifyou want. Changing colors in pixel art is refreshingly simple, too, with the indexing. :D (I'm going to have to pass on anyy shading critique, I'm much too new at dithering myself.) |