International Book Shading - Shadow Urtheart

This is the International Book Style (IBS) tutorial, which will show you how to apply the IBS shading style used in Sonic Pinball Party onto larger Pixel Art models.

The IBS style shading technique requires you to have a fairly large pixel art to use, and also uses the dithering technique, so if need be, go back to the Basic techniques section and look through the dithering tutorial.

First you will need your palette. It must be a minimum of 4 colours. The darkest tone is your Outline tone, the second darkest is your Shading tone. The lightest tone is your highlight tone, and you can have more than one of these. The last tone is your base tone.

First remove the main colour from your pixel art and go around the outline of the area with your Outline tone.

Next use your shading tone and create a 1 pixel width boarder, starting 2 pixels away from the edge of the outline, going around the biggest curves in the area. This 2 pixel width can be increased as the border gets nearer the finish or focal point of the curve, which is where the character's features move the most. This is easy with our Sonic pixel art, in this case we go around his spikes and increase the boarder width at the end of his spikes.

Go back along your borders and gradually increase the thickness of the boarder to where the focus of the curve is.

Still with the shading tone dither on the inside of the curve. You should dither a width of 1 more than the block shading before it, so if the boarder is one pixel width you dither a 2 pixel width inside the curve. This again should increase with the boarder width increase.

Next fill in the area with your base tone using either the fill tool or the rubber trick.

Remember that 2 pixel gap we left between the boarder and the outline? Get out your highlight tone and shade in the half closest to the border.

If you want to use more than one highlighting tone, use any extra tones where the highlight shading is more than one pixel width, using lighter tones nearer the outline.

This technique will not work for smaller areas, for instance the ears, legs and front part of the face are all too small to be done in this technique. There are numerous was of getting around this. For areas that are about 4 pixels wide, you can put your boarder 1 pixel width away from the edge, use little or no dithering, and don't use a highlighting tone. This is shown here on the ears.

For areas of 3 or 2 pixels, simply shade a 1 pixel width boarder leaving no gap between the outline, and don't use any dithering or highlighting. Here it is shown on the eyebrow and legs.

Any area less than two pixels width or no clear curve should be shaded simply with the base tone.

When shading white areas, there is no need to use a highlight tone, simply use your base white as the highlight tone.

Rings, bracelets and other circular metallic objects are shaded differently and this time you will need a second highlight tone. Start off again by removing colours and then using your outline tone around the area.

Use your shading tone and start shading on the opposite side to the main curve. When you are about two thirds of the way around, curve the shading towards the outside of the circle, stopping when you reach it. Dither as you would normally as well.

Use your new lightest highlight to make a small patch of light on the end of the shading which curved back towards the outside of the object.

With your darker highlight tone go around the inside curve of the object and around the other highlight tone.

Fill in the rest with your base tone. This gives the metallic objects a distinctive feel separate from that of normal materials, but still fits in with the style.