Dithering - Roareye Black

To begin this technique, it is best to remove all of the shading from the area of your chosen art piece. As above, we have removed Sonic's head colours and we've prepared our palette. For this technique you will need twice as many tones as normal. So if you want to do three toned shading (As we will be in this tutorial) you will need six tones of colour.

There are two ways of doing this. The first is to use the Line tool to draw vertical lines of colour across the bulk of the work. The second is to place each of the pixels onto the head with the Pencil Tool. It is usually best to use a mixture of both, using the line tool to easily fill a wider area, then using the Pencil tool for detail close to borders (Like eyebrows, ears etc) and also for cleaning up any stray pixels.


Notice that the colour palette chosen has been split into two groups of three. At the top are the two lightest tones, then two medium tones and finally your two darkest tones. This makes it easier to remember which tones to use. Now start by placing the light and shade detail using the Pencil Tool, using the very lightest tone and the second darkest tone (The first and third shades on the left palette group). This should give the effect of the first picture. Then you can fill in the empty sections in between with the lightest second tone (Middle left palette).

Now you have finished with your left palette, it's time to use the right. You need to fill the blank pixels (Purple on my example) that are in between all of the lightest tone, using the top shade of the right palette, fill in these blanks. Then do the same with the darkest palette, using the darkest tone to fill in the darker shade's blanks. After this is done, you should get a similar effect as the first picture. Having done this, the only empty pixels left should be the middle tone. Fill these in (Probably quickest using the Rubber Tool trick) with the medium tone from the right palette and you'll have a completed area of Dithering.


You can do Dithering anywhere on the body, as shown in the image sequence above. Dithering is one of the most important techniques to learn, because with some slight editting, it can be used as multiple different textures and can be used to get the most out of a small colour palette in Modernist Pixel Artworks.