Lightsourcing - Joe the Echidnafox

In this tutorial, we will be working with Light Sources. With sprites, it could be easier due to having less to work with, but also harder, as you need to have more attention to the detail. To start, we will take a Sonic sprite, and remove all color from the head. Now, you might notice a small imag on the top right corner. That is what we'll be using as a light source, but when you do your own, you can plae it wherever you want.

This tutorial will require some thought and imagination on your part. You need to imagine where the light is going to hit the brightest. Since I'm using Sonic's original Advance sprite colors, we have three tones to play with. Because of this, we only want to show in this first step where the brightest light will be on Sonic's head. Because of where my lightsource is, his forehead, and ears will be the brightest areas, while the upper part of the back of his head will have some light also. Remember when drawing out your lighting lines that the further away a certain part of the body is from the lightsource, the less light will hit it. I've shown this by making the light shade thinner and weaker near the back of the top spike, also by making it disappear by the time it gets to the base of the ears. These small details will help when choosing your lit areas.

Now take the middle tone and do the same as the lightest tone, gradually add shading around the lightest tone. Where the lightest tone stopped on the top spike, continue the light on further with the second light tone as well as surrounding the lightest tones so that the light is gradually darkening. On the two spikes behind his head I have used the second light tone as the lightest tone because of the distance these spikes are to the light source. Don't forget to slowly shade around the form of hs head (His basic head is a sphere, so using the second darkest tone below his ear to wrap round to his spikes works better as well as breaking up the dark tones).

After the last two tones have been used, the final, darkest tone should simply be put into the blank areas using any way of recoloring yoy desire. Then end result might not look like my example above, it depends on where you've put your lightsource and where you think the light would hit the character, however as long as your shading is following the lightsource, then your picture should be perfectly fine.

You can apply this technique anywhere on the body, just rememeber that the width of the light's brightest tone should match the bodypart it is hitting. So the forehead has a big shine to it because it is a wide area, however Sonic's arm would have very little light tone on it at all. The above image shows how this technique can be used on a smaller area, such as Sonic's arm. This principal technique will be used in all texturing styles and some shading styles, and is one of the hardest Basic tutorials to learn.