Official Battle Style - Shadow Urtheart

This is the Sonic Battle style shading tutorial. This technique will show you how to colour Pixel Art in the same way as in Sonic Battle.
This tutorial is based on Speedla's original Sonic Battle tutorial.

Sonic Battle had its own unique artwork style and this tutorial will help show you how to make your own Pixel Art follow this style.

When selecting colours, you need to make sure you have at least 3 tones for each colour, a base tone, a highlight tone, and a shading tone, however in many cases 2 tones are used for the shading or base tone. You will also need an outline tone, which should be a very dark version of your character's main colour. Also note, white does not need any highlight tones.

Starting with your character's main colour, take out the colour ready to shade, and then go over all of the outlines in your outline tone. This includes the back around the eyes, nose and for the smile.

Use the your shading tone (the lightest one if you have two) and fill in places where light will not reach as well. A light has been placed in the top left corner to help illustrate this.

If you have a second highlight tone, use it around the areas you have used the first higlight tone to emphasize a slight highlight, or in areas that are yet to be shaded to give a small highlight. Use this tone more sparingly than your other ones.

When all of your highlight and shading tones are on, fill the rest in with your base tone. The base tone should take up most of the body of your Pixel Art.

All colours are shaded in this way, with the exception that white has no highlight shade and so needs no higlight.

If you have a second shading tone (such as the white and skin tones here) use them again sparingly and use it within your already shaded areas to highlight areas in great darkness. This is most important on the gloves to give them more definition and depth.

Although the shading is down there are two major things which stop this looking like a Sonic Battle piece, the eyes and the outline.

Battle eyes are much more simplistic than the advance style. This shows a small transformation of Advance (left) to Battle (right). Eyes in battle have one shade and are simply a strip (usually a rectangle of one pixel width, depending on the size of the Pixel Art) outlined with the outline tone. Then some pixels are removed from the corner of outline of the eye. This cut out in the border should be in the same direction for both eyes.

This is the effect when applied to the character itself. It should be noted that you may wish to add some of your shading tone around some of the corners of the eyes.

The last thing that stops this looking like a Battle Styled Pixel Art is the outline. Battle style requires slightly thicker and sharp outlines. Get your pencil tool out and increase the outline width to two or three pixels. Increase this amount in areas that turn sharply such as spikes or ears. Don't worry about being too neat either, the style is meant to look hard lined and rough.

And there you have it, one ready to battle Pixel Art. Practice the technique and combine it with different textures to get a more stylized colouring techniques.