Colour Blending - Shadow Urtheart

Please note that this Tutorial requires you to have basic Maths knowledge of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication and number rounding. If possible please have a calculator at hand and something to write on (a notepad document will do) Bear in mind that blending colours should be the last thing you do to your Pixel Art (however the technique can also be used to make large pallettes).
Tutorial by Shadow Urtheart, all text and imagery is copyright to Shadow Urtheart unless otherwise stated.

Without a gradient tool, MS Paint is not known for its colour blending skills, so this tutorial will show you how to do it. First we will start with a simple background of a Sunset. This obviously looks rubbish so let's try actually blending it to make it look slightly better.

First you need to start with your two colours, choose one to be your starting colour, and one to finish with. Here I am going to use the Yellow as my starting point. Start a pallette with these two colours and leave a big gap between them so you can put your other colours in.

With your Starting colour selected (in this case the yellow), go to the menus at the top, select "Colors", and then "Edit Colors"

This first menu is no good, as it only gives us a limited option of colours. We can fix this by pressing the "Define Custom Colors" Button.

Now the "Edit Colors" window has the ability to choose many different colours. The most important thing to note is the boxes with numbers in the bottom right hand corner. These are the important values because they will show you the difference between the two colours. I don't need to go into what they do, but you need to write down each number, and remember which one goes with which.

When you have those numbers written down on a piece of paper (if you don't have paper use notepad or another word processing document on your computer), go and select the other colour and then go back to the "Edit Colors" Menu. Notice the numbers are different. Write these numbers down too.

Now for some Maths. You need to decide how many different shades you want in between the two colours, the more shades you have, the better it will blend, but also the more room it will take up. In this case I am going to have 5 shades between the two colours. Start by taking each number from your starting colour and taking away the corresponding number on your finishing colour. For instance, in this example the new Hue value would be 40-13=27 (If you can't do these in your head, the calculator for Windows is in Start > All Programs > Accessories > Calculator)

With your new numbers, divide by one more than the number of extra shades you want. Make sure you keep ones that are negative as a negative number and be accurate (at least 3 numbers after the decimal point). Here we want 5 shades, so we divide by 6. This new number is important so keep it safe, you need to use it multiple times.

Use your new number and take it away from Starting colour values (any negative numbers are added instead of subtracted). Round these values to the nearest whole number and put these new values into the "Edit Color" Menu (don't worry if the Red, Green or Blue Values change while putting in other details, if you put in the correct numbers afterwards it should still work). You will have created a new shade, just off your starting shade.

Make a new patch of this colour under your starting colour. One shade down. Now re-select your starting colour again to get ready to make the 3rd shade in our chart.

Use the numbers and values from your starting colour and subtract the same numbers but this time do it twice. Again round them to the nearest whole number and put your new values into the "Edit Colors" menu (remember if some of the values change while you put in your new values leave them, if ever in doubt, ignore Hue, Sat and Lun, and just change the Red, Green and Blue Values). You'll have your 3rd shade now.

Add this new colour to your chart, select the Starting colour again, this time you'll need to subtract your values 3 times, by now you should get the picture, keep doing this until you have the amount of shades you want. (You will only have to do this for the amount of times equal to the amount of blending shades).

This is what a full chart should look like; hopefully you can see how the colour goes from one to the other.

Okay, so how do we apply this to the sunset? Well you have to apply the colours in between the break of colours. Start my making another pallette of colours that is a completely different colour to what you are going to shade. If your confused look at the image to see how it works.

Start off with the middle shade on your new pallette (or one of the middle shades if you have an even number of them), and place a line across where the blending will take place. You can make this line as big as you want.

From here you shade using your alternate pallette outwards from the centre line. In this case the lighter purple shades will go below into the yellow area, while the darker shades go above the line into the orange area. These lines do not need to be the same size, you can make them smaller or larger (but make sure as you go out each one keeps getter smaller or larger in a uniform manner). Here I have simply copied the centre line and changed it's colour each time before pasting it on again.

Now the easy bit. Use the colour charts together, re-colour the extra colours with your original blending colours.

This method won't give you perfect results, but it is as close to gradient shading as you can get in MS Paint. The more shades you use in between the better the effect will be.

Ok let's try this on a character. Today we are going to give Knuckles purple ended dreadlocks, as if he dyed it and now his roots are showing.

When you look at Knuckles, you will notice he has 3 shades of red on him. This means you have to do a blending pallette for each shade of red. This is the most time consuming part, but needs to be done. You will need to do a pallette for each shade of a colour. Here you can see the three pallets we will be using on Knuckles.

Ok first of all here is Knuckles without any blending, you can see very clearly the place where the colour changes. So let's fix that.

Again create another extra pallette in a completely different and unrelated colour so that we can tell where we are working clearly. You only need the one; we'll work on each shade separately.

As with the background, start with a mid tone and work your way out, however only do it on one shade of red/purple, I usually start with the lightest shade.

Once done, put in the correct colors so that the lightest shade is completely blended. It may not look much better yet, but we're not finished.

Now grab your extra pallette again (the green one in this case) and do the same thing on the next tone down/up.

You may have already guessed these next steps. Use your colour chart again and fill in the correct colours.

Do the same for your last or any other remaining shades you have.

Just for comparison here is the blended with the non-blended one up close.

The technique is harder to do with sprites due to the small size. You will end up using fewer tones between each colour. The result is also not that great, in most cases, it is not worth it.

Just to finish off here are some examples of the technique in use. Notice the connection in green and blue, using only 4 shades it still smoothes it out. It can also be seen in the orange to yellow hair blends. Character Roareye is copyright to Roareye Black, Catherine created by Shadow Urtheart, Knuckles copyright to SEGA/Sonic Team