Sparkly Shiny Tutorial (How to make bright and shiny Pixels)
Posted: Wednesday, February 06, 2008
If your pixels are flat and lifeless, revitalize them... with this tutorial. 
Are you ready to try a new coloring style for your pixel art? Then say goodbye to drabness, and hello to shiny, sparkly color palettes that make your pixels gleam.
I’ll show you how to shade for your pixels with a shiny style in this tutorial.
Sparkle and Shine: Understanding light
Do you have something silky, and something velvety? Try holding them both up to the light and moving them around. Notice how the velvety thing doesn’t reflect much light, and the silky thing does? Smooth surfaces are reflective, rougher ones are less so. Not everything is going to gleam like a thousand suns, so it’s important to think of the surface of the item that you want to pixel. A shiny cookie would look a bit strange, but it’s ok to exaggerate shininess, and make, like, a slightly shiny carrot. Just try to understand the surfaces, because you might want to pixel an item with more than one surface later on. (Like a velvet coat with a silk scarf.)
You don’t have to be realistic when you do pixel art, but you should try to understand the rules before you break them. Now think about a sparkle, or look at a sparkly thing that you might have. Maybe hold it up to the light along with your silky item. Sparkly things reflect a lot of light at very few points, and certain points seem to either reflect maximum light or very little, while the shiny item has long, even reflections. Take a look at how light works on the textures around you while you are pixeling.
Picking your colors
When you’re shading your pixels in a shiny style, picking the right color palette is very important. You want to have a lot of contrast between your darkest and lightest color, but it’s also important that the colors in the middle of the palette are closely grouped. That is, although you want the brightest color to be almost white, the palette should not be a steady progression from your outline color to the highlight color. Your outline color should be several shades darker than your darkest inner color. You can have either one outline color, or more, just make sure that your outline colors are darker than your darkest shading color. Likewise, you can have more than one highlight color, but make sure that your highlight colors are much lighter than your lightest shading color.
Another thing that I like to do is keep my darker colors relatively saturated (Don’t mix in a lot of grey) so that they don’t look too dreary.
Here is an example palette.
You can see that the two colors on each end are kind of separate form the colors in the middle, and the colors in the middle are very close to each other. You may also notice that the outline is not black or very dark at all, but still works as an outline.
Another thing to remember when you are picking colors to make your pixels bright and shiny is to make the colors brighter and more saturated than they are in reality. Pixels are about representing, rather than close mimicry. Blueberries in reality may appear purplish black, but a pixel blueberry is blue. 
Just look at this blueberry compared to real blueberries. Cherries are dark red, but a pixel cherry would most likely be the color of a fire engine.
Tip: One thing that you should definitely not do is try to get palette colors from a photo, they will look very drab and grey. Try making your own palette in another color, like blue.
Shading the pixel
Take a look at the two pixels using the palette from the last section side-by-side. Both of them are a rectangle, and both use the same palette, but the one on the left looks way less like a flat, shiny surface. It looks sort of like it’s unshiny, and the middle is at a higher elevation than the sides and corners.
Tip: Some of you may recognize the pixel on the left is ‘pillow shaded’. That means that the darkest shading color is always right next to the outline color, and the color values increase from there. Every color in the pixel is next to whatever color it’s next to in the palette. You generally want to avoid this type of shading. Just like the name suggests, it makes everything look like a fluffy pillow, regardless of whether or not it is even supposed to.
Now, look at the image zoomed in to see the difference.
Let’s learn how to shade the pixel on the right.
- Open a new file and grab the palette I used, or that you made in the previous step.
- Make a rectangle with the outline color.
- Decide where the light is coming from. I decided that the light was in the top left corner, but also above the pixel, shining down. You can draw a pixel to remind you where your lightsource is.
- Take your second lightest color and outline the rectangle.
- Take the next darkest color, and change the outline on the places furthest away from the light source. Change the outline to your lighter outline color where the pixel is nearer to the lightsource.
- Shade the inside of your pixel according to its shape and where the light source is. I made a straight line to emphasize the smoothness of the shape.
- Now add the sparkles and gleams of light with your whitest color. My sparkles are all just points of white. Not all sparkles have to be exactly circular, some take the shape of the surface, and add more reflection.
I've shown you haw to make a flat pixel here, but remember to use shine to emphasize the shape of your pixel.
Take a look at the blueberry pixel shaded like it's flat in step 1. In step 2 and 3 I added a light circle to emphasize the berry's roundness.
The only way to get this is to try it. So go on out and open up a new image and start pixeling!
Conclusion
If you apply the techniques for picking colors, and shading from this tutorial you should notice your pixels start to go from drab to fab as you practice. If not, just lather, rinse, and re-read the tutorial. If there’s something you don’t get, you can ask my questions with the contact form.
In Part 2 of the Sparkly, Shiny Tutorial, I will cover sparkly, and shiny animation effects that you can add to your pixel creations. It probably won't be soon, or even next up. I have lots of other tutorials that I'm working on, plus I'm lazy.
Have fun pixeling.