Pillow Shading - Shadow Urtheart

Pillow shading will create gradients of shading, which can be used to give a pixel art depth or a glowing effect. This tutorial is based on Cyberblade's original Pillow shading tutorial.

Find your character and choose a colour palette to use, in this case we'll just recolour Sonic in this style. You should try to have at least 3 tones, but there is no limit to the amount you can have, just make it sensible in relation to the size of the pixel art.

Before you start to reshade the character, make sure that any important areas, such as the eyebrows, which are not part of the black outline are recolured black, otherwise this technique will cause your character to look weird. Here I have highlighted the areas in green.

Once all those details have been coloured black, fill in the rest of the area you want to shade with a completly unrelated colour.

Next you need to go around all the basic shapes of the character with your darkest tone. This does not mean that you just go around every black line, a good example would be the head, where you should follow the outline of the head, but not that of the ear.

I would advise concentrating on one area at a time. Here the head, with the exception of the ears, has had it's first shade put on.

Take your next tone up, and go around the first tone you put down.

After your second tone is down, take the next tone up and go around the last tone you put down, hopefully you can start to see the pattern now.

Repeat again for the next tone up. Don't worry if at some points you either can't shade because you have run out of room, or the shading meets up with itself, just keep going with what you can do.

Fill in the rest with your lightest tone to finish the effect. This technique works well with big areas.

If you want to try and make an object look further away, you can use a two pixel width boarder instead of a single one to give the impression of the area being further away.

To make an area seem closer, start off on a lighter tone and build up from there. Here the closest ear has been started off on the third tone rather than the first.

For smaller areas such as legs or arms, only shade from one side, rather than around the whole outline. This should still give the depth you need, rather than being too dark if you had done it from both sides.

This technique is a base for many others, and works well when mixed with other textures and shading styles.