Overshine Shading - Shadow Urtheart

This is the tutorial for Overshine Style Shading, a simple comic book style to give pixel art a slight 3D or raised effect. The basic idea is a mixture of Pillow and Bland shading. This tutorial is made and owned by Shadow Urtheart.

Overshine is a simple shading style to use on Pixel Art with a moderate area to shade. For this technique you will need a base tone, a highlight tone, at least three shading tones, and an outline tone.

Next take out the colours of your Pixel Art, making sure to leave any details such as eyebrows in tact or shaded in a different colour (here they are dark yellow)

With your darkest tone (the outline tone), fill in all the detail, also using this tone. You may wish to fill in all the black lines around the area you are shading. For anything on the border, simply fill one pixel width around the characters area.

At this point you need to decide where your light source is coming from. Here I have indicated where it is coming from using the light in the top left corner (thanks to Roareye for the light image)

With your light source now in place, use your first shading tone (the darkest one) shade on the opposite side to where the light will hit. Always use a one or two pixel width border for this shade (all other shades lighter than this colour must be the same or bigger width)

With your second shading tone, go around the whole boarder of the character (both were the light hits and where it does not). This to continue the dark shading on one side, but to give depth on the highlight side. The size of this boarder should be equal or 1-2 pixels bigger than your first highlight

Next use your highlight tone on the side nearest the light. The bigger the pixel width, the bigger shine effect you will create. It is best to keep it the same size as your second shading tone.

Use your final shading tone on the opposite side to the light again. This should be at least one pixel width more than your second shading tone.

Simply fill in the rest with your base tone to complete the effect. This technique is the same for almost all colours.

The only exception is white, where the only difference is that there is no highlight tone. Simply shade in all 5 other tones as you normally would and fill in your base tone where the highlight would be (this assumes you base tone is a pure white, in which you can not make lighter)

You can vary this style to give you different effects. In this case 2 highlight tones have been used instead of the one which has given the shoe a different type of shine.

Remember to treat each character differently when using this technique. In the case of characters like Shadow, his stripes are a part of his body and so the highlights continue through his colours rather than going around them.

However when characters are made out of metal, and each part is a separate plate, the shading must be done around the colours, this gives it more of a metallic feel.