Lightsourcing - Roareye Black

In this tutorial, we are going to work with light sources. To get the best result, I have removed all of the colour from Sonic's head (Using the Rubber technique in Recolouring) and filled it in a dark purple to give me space to work. You can either copy this image for practice or you can practice the Rubber technique on your own Sonic pixel art. I also recoloured the dark blue border around Sonic into pure black as I'm going to be colouring him in blue for this tutorial.
You'll notice on the top right corner of the picture is a small image of a light (Yeah, rubbish isn't it? XP) which I've put there so you know where I've put my light source. You can make an image or sign for where your light source is on your canvas too if you like.

This tutorial will require some thought and imagination on your part. You need to imagine where the light is going to hit the brightest. Since I'm using Sonic's original Battle art colours, we have four tones to play with. Because of this, we only want to show in this first step where the brightest light will be on Sonic's head. Because of where my lightsource is, his forehead, eyebrows and ears will be the brightest areas. Remember when drawing out your lighting lines that the further away a certain part of the body is from the lightsource, the less light will hit it. I've shown this by making the light shade thinner and weaker near the back of the top spike, also by making it disappear by the time it gets to the base of the ears. These small details will help when choosing your lit areas.

Now take the second light tone and do the same as the lightest tone, gradually add shading around the lightest tone. Where the lightest tone stopped on the top spike, continue the light on further with the second light tone as well as surrounding the lightest tones so that the light is gradually darkening. On the two spikes behind his head I have used the second light tone as the lightest tone because of the distance these spikes are to the light source. Don't forget to slowly shade around the form of hs head (His basic head is a sphere, so using the second darkest tone below his ear to wrap round to his spikes works better as well as breaking up the dark tones).

Now with the third tone (Sonic's medium tone) start to fill in the smaller gaps (Such as the leftover spaces in the ears) and work your way through the artwork like before. Now that the first two tones have set the basic form of the shading, it should be a much more simple process. Don't forget that we have one more tone to use, and that darker tone will be used to make the finished result more striking.

After the last three tones have been used, the final, darkest tone should simply be put into the black areas using either the Fill tool or the Rubber tool technique shown in Recolouring. Then end result might not look like my example above, it depends on where you've put your lightsource and where you think the light would hit the character, however as long as your shading is following the lightsource, then your picture should be perfectly fine.

You can apply this technique anywhere on the body, just rememeber that the width of the light's brightest tone should match the bodypart it is hitting. So the forehead has a big shine to it because it is a wide area, however Sonic's arm would have very little light tone on it at all. The above image shows how this technique can be used on a smaller area, such as Sonic's arm. This principal technique will be used in all texturing styles and some shading styles, and is one of the hardest Basic tutorials to learn.