Indentation - Roareye Black

In this tutorial, we're going to show how to use the Indent technique which will make certain key features in a picture pop out at the viewer. This is a basic technique which you can apply into any other colouring or texture style, in fact several textures use the basic indenting technique to emphasise depth of materials. To show off this technique, take your pixel art and remove all the colours from him using the Fill or Rubber technique.

We'll be using 4 tones of Green in this tutorial just to change Sonic's colour again. In a similar fashion to the Lightsourcing tutorial, you will place a pixel's width of the lightest tone on the top of the bodypart you want to make pop out. So we want the eyebrows and ears to pop out. We're also going to do an inverse-indent on the eyes to make them appear to ben sunken further into Sonic's head rather than having them sticking out at the same level as his skin. So place the one pixel width of green on the eyebrows and ears, then place the darkest tone of grey on the eyeball at the top, making sure it follows the curve of his eyelid.

From here, take the darkest green and run it across the opposite side of the borderline (If you're applying this to a borderless textured image, then just put the light and dark tones directly next to one another) so that they clash like in the above picture. It's this effect of the lightest and darkest tones clashing that makes this effect work, so don't worry about that. With the inverse indent effect, add another lighter shade to the area (Another shade of grey to the eyeball) as shown above.

Go around the darker shades with the third tone (Second darkest) and don't be afraid to let some of the third tone touch the first (Lightest tone). This usually helps increase the effect. Also with the two medium tones, you can make the shading thicker so it covers more space and makes the effect bolder. With the inverse-indent, add a third and final shade to the eye and that section is complete.

Now to see the indenting effect, grab the second tone and just fill the entire head like above. you'll see the effects of the indent immediately.

If you wish to you can finish off the head like this so that you end up with a nicely shaded head with indented sections, such as the picture above. You can use any shading style you like, however all types of shading and texturing should work with the indenting technique, so if the indent makes an area darker, the shading style goes darker with it.