Pixel Art 101: Shading Tutorial

welcome back do you suck at shading you probably do because you click the video let's get to it I'm one of the artists working on dwarf and I'm gonna teach you how to shade some pixel art yeah you should wish this this game alright burrows and bro debts so I'm gonna start by drawing a square shading a square how entertaining but come on now that's how we got to start we gotta start by shading a square and in a circle too right actually why divided make two all right and then let's put that circle right there right over data okay we don't need that anymore okay so let's say this is a top-down game and this is gonna be like a crate or something okay so I'm just gonna put Brown there create a piece of furniture whatever right so personally I like to erase the bottom line because this is the part where it touches the floor so whenever you're shading let me do this one green it's gonna be apple or something actually red so whenever you're shading you have your normal color and then you have your darker color right obviously so what we need to do here is go darker and if you remember in my last video I introduced you to the HSV so if you're using a sprite or if you're using Photoshop you want to you want to get on the HSV get off that RGB that's just for news so HSV U is going to be your color the saturation is the amount of that color and value or vibrance I forget which one it is who cares it's if how much white or black is in that color if you're in Photoshop and you click on the color you can see that they have HSB and RGB the HSB is the same as the HSV in a sprite the B is brightness and I guess they call it vibrance in a spray it's the same thing doesn't matter but another thing that you can do is you can go to window and search for a color and this is what you should just have up and over here you have the the same three sliders you have your hue/saturation and your brightness so there you go that's what you can do for Photoshop and right here you can choose different kinds of versions of this so like you can have a hue but what you really want is you want this HSB slider and that or you want the color wheel because the color wheel will have the slider and obviously the color wheel to get to that window you can click the color right here and it'll pull up that window I like to just keep this window open and not close it and I'll just put it somewhere I'll dock it somewhere all right enough of that right so obviously if you want to shade all you got to do is go darker if you look at the saturation this looks gray or it doesn't look darker and you are correct so the simplest thing that you could do is just move down on the value and that's all we're gonna do for now because I want to use this as an example and we're going to go ahead and shade that you should always have this let me move this here you should always have this window where you can see what it looks like from far away because from far away you can see the contrast here isn't high enough so I actually I need to go further now the contrast is high enough to notice when you're zoomed in it's really easy to see the difference in the in the vibrance in the color but from far away sometimes your shading needs more contrast and that's why you got to make sure you have these little windows over here anyway so that's it that tutorial done I'll tell you how to do to shade right well I'll show you a few more things so let me go ahead and copy this and paste it over here and I'll show you the different the different ways you can select the darker color so obviously I just went down on the vibrance but another thing you can do let me see how much I want okay yeah so another thing that you can do is not just decrease the vibrance vibrance but also decrease the saturation and I'm gonna kind of overdo it a little bit here but so this one I decreased is a decrease to the saturation let me copy paste that I'm gonna actually put these closer to each other and then for this one what I'm gonna do is I'm going to increase the saturation alright so I'm gonna actually reorder these so I'm gonna put this one first and so this one is just decreasing the value this one is decreasing the value and increasing the saturation this one is decreasing the value and decreasing the saturation but there's a couple more all right this is where we get to the like really interesting kind of shading so I'm just gonna go ahead and copy the the first one again and here's how you can make your shading how you can make your shading interesting well let me zoom out okay there we go so we let's say we want to make a darker version of this color so of course we can decrease the vibrance but to make it seem a little bit more interesting what a lot of pixel artists that do is they when they decrease the when they decrease the vibrance they go towards blue or red what I mean by that is as you are as you are shading you are going towards a blue tint or a red tint those are the two most common tints to go towards and if you're creating content that's outside like a forest etc you should probably go towards the blue alright so the next thing I'm gonna introduce you to is hue shift shading what this is is this is is that as you as you shade you slowly keep sliding the hue over so I'm gonna go a little bit left with this one and it makes for a more interesting color and I'm sure you've seen this in other pixel artists art you just didn't realize what they were doing and that's it that's that's the trick to have more interesting colors when you shade so I went left with that one and with this one I'm going to go to the right and there you go alright so I'm gonna stick with this one which is my favorite and I'll show you a couple of extra things and I'll show you a couple of extra things to snazz it up to make it snazzy geez this thing's huge wouldn't so remember how I said when you're shading and yeah you can often go towards a red or a blue hue so let's go ahead and change this black line here red well I'll do both just just to show you so I went ahead and I color picked it I obviously need to increase the saturation a little bit or else there'll be no color in it and I don't know where my hue is so let me increase the vibrance just to make sure I'm on red yeah I'm in red and you know and I'll pick a really dark red I'm gonna go really high up on the saturation but I'm gonna make sure that the vibrance is low and now if I click this it has it almost looks black like subconsciously people think this is black but it's not it's it's a shade of red and it makes the object look a little bit more interesting I mean look I'm gonna put this side-by-side and just look how much more interesting this one looks it's almost a subconscious but but it's a nice little touch so let me make a blue version of this too so once again I'm going to put the vibrance up make sure I'm on blue and then put the vibrance really low and there it is with the blue shading and it's really common to do either these the reason it's red or blue and not like orange or whatever it's because blue is a 4 is because blue is for cool colors red is for warm colors so whether you want your composition to feel to have to have that warm feel or that cool feel you'll either go towards blue or you'll go towards red I personally like the red one in this case especially since these are our warm colors ok so the next thing to make your make your objects pop is edge edge highlights and you see me do this in the furniture tutorial but basically add an edge you put a highlight and this is a sort of like a reflection it's the light reflecting on that edge and they create it creates more dimension but you don't need to just put it on the edge you can put it you can put it all around so let me let me show you this oh good this right here is still completely valid they're two they're two different techniques but basically all I'm doing is just adding a highlight to the edge so into erv we had these bushes and here's an example of how you can apply that technique to make your art have just better shading and pop so one is the outline and then a highlight on the edges and a gradient on the side and just compare these two this the one on the right obviously has a lot more dimension I don't know if the you know this is just this is my technique there's other people have different techniques but I think this works so you probably noticed that there were a few more things on that box and I'll explain those so since the light is coming from the top even on the outline here we can make it lighter and it'll give the object more form so just go ahead and color pick that and you know make it a bit lighter but you will want to decrease saturation on it because we don't want this to look like it's you know glowing once again I didn't put enough contrast in it I can tell by looking over here so I'm going to decrease the decreases saturation and increase the vibrance until I think that there's a nice contrast there I'm gonna I'm gonna overdo it a little bit you know just uh just to emphasize the this technique but but as you can see now it looks like there's a light coming from above onto this object so even the outline is part of the shading and the next thing is to basically add a gradient here on the side of this object some people don't really like to do too many gradients when they're doing pixel art and I totally get that especially if you do just like one like this it looks kind of weird it looks like I'm trying to say something like oh this piece this is two pieces of wood or something so you don't have to put a gradient on the side but it is kind of nice maybe at least you know near the bottom where it touches the ground you see that it looked kind of Greer doner an easy way to get a lighter color the fastest way for that I do to get a lighter color is let's say I wanted to put a lighter color right above this I'll color pick this color and I'll go to about half way which gives it transparency gives it an opacity and then I'll just draw that color right there so you don't actually you know you don't need to fiddle with this when you're kind of just doing a quick gradient you can just color pick and then change the helpful and then you can do the same now color pick this new color and yeah there you go when you're shading one of the things to consider is what kind of material it is so remember that highlight line I was talking about well if you increase the saturation I mean decrease saturation increase vibrance and you had a little line in the middle and then you do it again even even higher look at that it looks more reflective right so if you look at you know over here this looks more metallic it looks shinier I'm changing the material and you shouldn't do this effect if it's not metal but if it is metal you should totally do this effect and you know you can go all the way to white and add a couple of you know if you break it up like this like I am right here this makes it look like it's it's a very shiny reflective material look at that that looks metallic now so that's a quick way to make something go from maybe like wood to metal is just add a shine of shimmer all right you ready to learn the advanced here we go Borden so let's go ahead and shade this circle so obviously I'm not just gonna draw a line across I mean I just did but wait wait there it is okay so let's let's take this circle I'm gonna put the light source in here at the top whatever you know you do you guys know this this stuff this ain't nothing new it's just gonna take me a sec because I'm so okay so like that might be this might be how a kindergartener shades something right this is like the most basic shading technique you can do it you have the highlight there and you have the the shading down here but this one is way too dark it's still too dark and we should totally hue there we go baby and there we go this should be keep shifted to towards yellow yeah so I don't know if you noticed but I went to the right a huge shift into you shifted to the right when I was increasing the vibrance and I he shifted to the left so it'd be you know if you want to go if you have your base color and you want to make a highlight go to the right and then if you wanna shade go to the left on the hue bar is what I'm talking about anyway alright so what I'm gonna introduce you guys to is indirect light first thing I want to kind of show you is that to make this look more around personally what I like to do is I like to add the shade color around the entire edge of course you can make this more complicated and make this one darker or lighter like you know whatever I'll just do it right here so yeah this will get even darker you know but but anyway you get the point this this makes it look rounder god I picked a really stupid shade it's not even like a circle but um I think it did it cuz the F it's in 16 by 16 whatever you guys get the point but um okay anyway so it looks rounder if you shade around all the edges but that's not the advanced thing the advanced thing is indirect light so light of course shines you know from from above but it also is going to reflect off the ground and shine on two edges that aren't in direct sunlight hence indirect light here are some examples of that you can see the light color on around the edge so this is kind of the technique that we went through first you find just usually do a darker color then you add a highlight and a gradient and lastly you add the indirect light here's an example of that on a potion you know you might think uh you see how the edge isn't the darkest it actually has a highlight on it yeah that's indirect light you don't want to do this for every object it's for objects that are reflective okay so I'm just gonna draw for a little bit and explain what I'm doing here so I added the indirect lighting right here but now it looks like there's not enough shading so I'm going to increase the shading in the middle here and then I'm also going to I'd like to sort of highlight the top over here so I just chose a lighter red and I'm and I'm highlighting I'm adding a highlight around that around the top there I'm gonna go about half way that could be a little bit brighter I'm gonna increase the vibrance there I didn't know hue shift it because I don't want it to go too far away from the base color a nice thing to do with to make it seem a little more reflective would be to add a little you know had a little dot here or you could you know do a little edge if I do sort of like an edge like that I like to fade it so I'll go ahead and select this color go to about halfway and click it put it here and maybe here and now I can select that color and also kind of put it around these edges as well I think it looks I think it looks a little nicer when when the highlight is faded in a little bit so that I'm just gonna do that and hopefully this is making sense to you guys I'm trying to make this look extremely reflective so I'm adding all sorts of all sorts of reflections into this as you can see this highlight is way lighter than this one not all highlights have to go super bright but you should probably pick one and then make that one highlight go extremely bright so I'm going to do that right there and I'm gonna pick this spot right here for another highlight and then this shading right here seems kind of harsh it should have a transition so I'm just gonna do the same thing where I go halfway and now I'm going to select that color and I'm gonna use this color to transition into sort of like the base color of the main color and actually this highlight I think is actually it's too bright so I'm going to also use that color and on the bottom sort of just dim it a little bit and now if we zoom out this looks like extremely reflective orb a quick way to make adjustments is to just select that and go to adjustments hue and saturation you can also do this in Photoshop and now if you you know if you if you think that it should be a little bit more saturated have some more vibrant or you want to change the hue to something else you can do that if you're like oh crap I didn't you know increase the contrast enough you can go ahead and just use filters so you don't have to redraw stuff and you can sort and you can know you should be able to you know mess with this and get something close too close to what you want that's all for to put your pa'dar now you're a master shader I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Pixel Pete (Peter Milko)

Views: 285,641

Keywords: petermilko, peter milko, pixelpete, pixel pete, Color Palette, pixel art color, color, palette, shading, pixel shading, pixel art shading, shading tutorial

Id: jO9ruYaCJmU

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019