Gradient Toning - Roareye Black

Gradient Toning is a very time-consuming colouring style, however it's effect can be used in different textures, all of which will be catalogued in the Textures section. First of all, take your Sonic pixel art and remove all colour from the area you're going to apply the style on (In this case, the head). Note that I've moved Sonic's original colour palette off to the left so it's out the way but still accessible.

Your next task is to get the full colour palette you need. First of all, using the colour picker tool as shown, select Sonic's second lightest blue tone. Use the left mouse button to make this your primary colour. Once you have the light blue as your primary colour, go to the menu bars at the top of the screen, select 'Colors' then the option 'Edit Colors'. This will bring you to the custom colour menu.


Using the brightness bar, you can move the tone of blue lighter or darker using the mouse cursor. First of all, since there's a large area to cover, you'll want to choose a very light blue. The beginning tone I'm going to start with will be the light blue shown above. If you want to use the exact same tones, then you can input the numeral value in the boxes below the colour chart.


Now make a colour block on your canvas as a place to store your new palette. With this done, go back into the 'Edit Colors' menu and then, keeping the same colour on the colour chart, simply move the black arrow at the side down. If you squint your eyes, you can see what looks like blocks inside this scale. You move roughly two of these blocks down at first and when you get past the halfway mark, move it only one shade down at a time.

Continue the step above until you reach near the bottom of the tonal scale, you should end up with a colour lot like mine above. Now your first step is to draw the centre-line of the gradient. So I've chosen the middle of the forehead because it'll stand out more. Using the lightest tone, draw a line that follows along that curve. With that done, you now want to put the lightest shade on the areas where a lightsource will hit it (I'll use the same direction as the Lightsourcing tutorial which is the top right of the canvas) so you get a nice amount of detail.

Now you take the second tone on your palette and apply it to surround the lightest tone completely, as shown above. With this done, you simply repeat the rest for the rest of the body.

As you apply the effect, you'll notice that the brighter and darker tones will collide with the different light spots you've put in. As long as you surround each tone with a darker one (As seen above) then the effect will work perfectly. Simply blend these together.

Using the fourth colour in your palette, it may be best to add a light shine on the rear spikes. These wouldn't catch as much light, but definately need gradienting otherwise the effect won't work. By using a darker shade to start off with, we can achieve this effect. Then simply go over it as you have the rest of the head.

Simply finish your colouring off the way you started until the entire area is finished. I haven't use all of the tones I've made in the palette, which is a good thing. It's always best to have too many colours that are unused in gradient toning than too few, because that ruins the effect. Now I have a choice. I can either leave it as it is, with Sonic looking alot brighter than he normally does, or using the Rubber Tool trick (Taught in Basic Tutorials) to darken his colour. I chose to darken his colour. When doing the Rubber Tool trick, it's best to start by darkening the darker shade first and working your way up to the lighter ones. Its easier on the eyes and should prevent alot of confusion with similar tones.