Feather Texture - CyberBlade

We will be using the pixel art to the left as a basis of this tutorial - You can take it for this tutorial. I suggest mastering the cross hatching technique mentioned earlier in the tutorials before starting with this.

Here is a nearly fully shaded pheonix head. As you can notice, the feathering style has yet to be applied. Certain colours such as orange will appear better then others in this style. There is also an enlarged pic of how to cross hatch a single feathered layer. Due to the layered nature of feathers this won't appear correct however.

When you split them by one pixel like this however, it will appear to be feather like. Just keep repeating the layer like this. However, when the Dithering is applied over the shading, it will appear hideous without proper colouring and shading to it. The colour pallete we are using is shown to the left of the cross hatching.

Here, we have almost a colour by numbers example, except it's kind of a colour by colours example. In the place the Dithering goes over the shading, for the Dithering, use a colour on the pallete that is two shades lighter then the colour behind the Dithering. It is shown here through the different colours.
The finished shading will appear like this. As this is enlarged it doesn't appear to featherish but when shrunk (as shown) it will appear more like it. It would be much smaller on an actual pixel art, and much more heavily used, and therefore, would appear more like the feathering in the final Pheonix pixel art.

This is the finished head, notice it has a very feathered look to it. The dithering can be applied over many different styles, and difficulty will depend on the chosen style.

This is the finished pheonix pixel art. Notice how the entire pixel art has a feathered look. There is also a zoom in beneath the example showing the effect in use. Good luck spriting.