-[Pixel Shading Tutorial]-

1. Place your base of choice in the middle of a decent sized canvas. I use a 400x400 canvas usually.

2. Colours are a very important choice for your doll as is your pallette.
- The main colour scheme of this doll is going to be blue. So I create a pallette using 6 shades of blue. I usually space the shade gap evenly between each shade. Once I have all 6 colours I then select the darkest colour and then I lower it's saturation and put this colour beside the darkest colour and then I have a darker shade of the less saturated colour above it. I will explain about these later.

3. Now choose a 1 px thick brush and colour 1 to draw the outline of my dress in. Don't worry about how messy it looks at the moment this will be cleaned up. Is you can see at the waist I added a couple of small waves. This is because usually material gathers slightly at the waist.

4. Tidy up the outline by erasing any stray pixels so that the outline is only one pixel thick at anypoint along it.

5. Fill the outline up with colour 4.

6. Before shading the doll I draw in all the garments because the shading of the doll is effected by all the garments worn. For example the scarf round her neck casts a shadow onto the blue dress underneath. For the scarf colour 6 is white so it is unseen on the pallette.

7. This is now the hardest and most tedious bit of pixel shading, deciding where the folds go. Pick colour 3 on your pallette and draw in where the shadows will be. You can be very libereral with this colour as there are more shadow colours to come so don't be afraid to use colour 3 lots. Remember to add shadows under things such as the belt and the scarf too.

8. Now take colour 2 and draw in the darker shadows over the previous shadows. Now we just pick out the darker areas of the folds not the whole fold.

9. A mistake often made by dollers is to forget to add highlights. Highlights bring the doll to life so while you may think your doll looks good without them have a go at adding them in. Use colour 5 to add the highlights to the doll. Don't be afraid to go slightly wild.

10. Use colour 6 to add highlights to the highlights. This is where the most light is reflecting. I add these at the folds at the bottom of the dress where the dress fans out at her feet and any other fold that would stick out from the dress were it real.

11. Looking impressive huh? Well this is where Pyro's secret ingredient comes in. Those two darker unsaturated colours that I add to the side of the pallette. I'm going to call these colours A and B. Use colour A to shade in any areas of extreme shadow, these areas would look very black on any garment if they were real. So don't overdo it on this colour. Then use colour B to change the outline colour in any parts of the outline where the extreme shadow touches it.

12. Repeat steps 7-11 with all the other garments your doll is wearing remembering to consider which clothes have cast shadows onto other clothes.

13. For the hair I'm going to do a long straight style. Because the head is in portrait view the hair covers more of the head so don't be scared to cover parts of her face. I tend not to tidy up my pixels for hair because I feel this is unnecessary.

14. Fill in the hair with colour 4 like before.

15. Using colour 3 use long sweeping strokes to add in the shadows of the hair. Don't wory if you cover any of the outline colour but try to follow the shape of the hair.

16. Use colour 2 to add in the darker strands.

17. use colour 5 to add in some highlights.

18. use colour 6 to add in the extreme highlights.

19. Like with the clothes use A and B to pick up extreme shadow. Here that is under the chin and the hair that falls behind the back that is shadowed by the body.

20. Finished Right? nope. You're wrong. This is where we make a great doller stand out from a good doller. I'm first going to add some acessories like a couple of bracelets.
-Now I'm going to add detail to items already there.
-Using colour A from the blue pallette I just added some random pixels on the neck piece and some little pixels hanging off the neckpiece.
-Then I added some blue lace peeking out from under the shawl. I also added a teeny bit of it peeking out the other side of the arm too even though we don't see the arm. And because I put blue lace on the sleeves I also decided to have a teensy bit of lace hanging out the bottom of the blue skirt. Lace is easy to do in pixels. Just randomly dot pixels inside the area you want to be lacy, don't worry about a pattern because that doesn't matter.
-I added charms to the belt because I really like the way the belt stands out against the blue but it became lost because of it's lack of intricacy. Charms are very easy to draw, you don't need to make them complex. I just draw a line down and then add a couple of dots at the end of it. I also add a couple of hair slides to the hair so that the redy pink is seen somewhere else in the dress.

21. I see so many dolls where the eye colour from the base is just left there. This is a pet peeve of mine, change the eye colour, it makes a world of difference. I'm also going to make the lips the same redy pink colour as the belt by using that pallette.

22. I also add some make up, just in subtle pale colours, to make the face look less bland. Don't use black on the eyelashes, just use a dark colour to give the illusion of black otherwise the eyes will stand out too much.

23. Now for my final trick, just a tiny bit of extra shading to the base to make it look like the clothes are on the base not just floating over it. The clothes create casting shadows onto the base as well as other garments. This is a simple process. I use the outline colour and draw round the clothes onto the base where a shadow would be present.

24. Erase your pallettes and crop the canvas down to just round the doll, then make her transparent.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful for you. Any questions feel free to email me at satansangelpyro[at]googlemail[dot]com