Shading Techniques

There are many ways to go about giving colour and depth to your dolls. In this article I'll be showing how you can do that. Read more for explanations of pixelshading, dithering, toolshading and mutt-shading. How you can shade depends on your graphics program as well. When using Paint, it will be hard to toolshade, because you have no options of smudging or blending colours. Either way: read on for more information on how to shade pixel dolls.

Pixelshading:

• As each doll is made up of pixels (the smallest point on your computer screen), shading or drawing pixel by pixel is called pixelshading. This is the most basic form of making dolls.
  Close up of pixelshading:
  
  Base is from Pixel Stix

Dithering

• This is a technique close to pixeling. And at the same time it can create an effect like toolshading. Dithering is when one colour is blended into a another by putting the colours next to each other pixel by pixel. It is hard to describe so I'll show you.
  
  Instead of a hard edge, as with pure pixeling, you get a softer edge, of colours bleeding into each other.

Toolshading:

• Many advanced graphics programs have 'tools', shortcuts or instruments that help you achieve some effects. The use of these tools makes a doll toolshaded. Most common tools used are burn, dodge and smudge, or different shapes of brushes other than an aliased pixelpoint.
• Burn means to select the tool that makes the colour you draw on look darker. This helps when making smooth folds and shadow.
• Dodge means to make a colour you draw on look lighter. This helps making highlights on folds.
• Smooth means to select a tool that smudges or blends darker and lighter colours together, giving a smooth look to the doll, almost like it is painted on.
• Brushes are different shapes of your drawing cursor.
  Example of toolshading:
  
  Base is from Pixel Stix

Aliased / Anti-aliased

• Your graphics program may give you the option of 'aliased' or 'anti-aliased' brushes. Aliased means that there is a sharp, pixel edge, dropping the colour on exactly the pixels you point at. Anti-aliased means the opposite: it blends your drawing colour into the background, making it look smooth and softer.

Layers

• When using an advanced graphics program you can usually work with a thing called layers. Layers are just that: you can make a new drawing layer for every piece of the doll. This helps to make changes easily to only one part of your doll.
  Such as when you start with long hair, but want to change it to short. Everything under the hair will have to be redrawn. But if you have two separate layers, you can just adjust the hair layer by erasing some hair. You will need to have drawn things that go under the hair (a top for instance) on a separate layer.
  Most programs also allow you to turn layers on and off, so you can work on the shirt layer without having the hair in the way.

Mutt shading

• Anything that is not completely tooled or pixeled shaded can be called 'mutt shaded'. You use parts of both techniques.

For more information on shading techniques: Caelest's dA article Pixel and Cell shading
Also take a look at an experiment in shading with one palette by Mariiii