Recolouring - Roareye Black

There are several tricks that will help, especially later on, in your colouring skills. To begin, take a pixel art from an artsheet (Available on this site) and place it onto your empty MS Paint canvas. You can add an unused colour to replace the white if it makes working on your artwork easier, here I've used a Cyan colour.

First of all, you need to select your colours. For the purpose of this tutorial, Sonic will be recoloured purple. To change the colours you wish to use, bring your mouse cursor down to bottom of the screen to the colour swatches. Choose a colour you want to replace, and then double click the left mouse button.

You will be brought to a menu of more colours. From here you can choose one of the new pre-sets OR you can click the 'Define Custom Colors >> ' button, which will bring you to the full colour spectrum. Using your cursor, you can pick any colour and tone you wish from the colour chart.

If you already know the colour's numeral settings you can also put them in at the bottom. These number inputs aren't really useful at the moment, but when you go to later tutorials, they will be used more.

With the colour and tone chosen (I've chosen the medium tone of purple for this tutorial), you can use the Fill tool to fill over Sonic's medium blue. Make sure that you fill in any pixels that are stray (Not attached to the main bulk of the blue) so that your end artwork will be completely purple.


If you want to make sure that you've coloured over all of the small stray pixels, you can either hunt them down with the fill tool or use the Rubber. To use the rubber without ruining your work, you have to have Sonic's original medium blue as your primary colour, and your new medium colour as your secondary colour. The picture above will show you how your colour selection should look.
From here, click and hold the RIGHT mouse button and then sweep the cursor across the artwork. The second picture above shows the movement I made, whereas the third shows the actual effects of using the Rubber tool. Using this technique, you can rub out all of Sonic's original medium blue without damaging your work by simply running the cursor across him.

Now that you've done the process once, with Sonic's medium blue, you just need to repeat the process for his lighter and darker tones. It's usually best to add the Medium tone colour into "Add to custom Colours" in the colour chart (Get back to it by double clicking the medium tone swatch again) so that you can easily reach the lighter and darker tones of that colour. However once you have repeated this process for the light and dark tones, you'll have a finished recolour.

Of course, it's not only purple you can use. You can use any colour you want, and anywhere you want. This tutorial has only shown you Sonic's trademark blue, however the process is identical for every part of the body you recolour. I've made a small selection of different recolours above just for examples.