-Pillow shading/banding:
This is pillow shading and it's utterly horrible.
If you look at the middle of the head, you can see 1px thick lines that are arranged in a gradient. This is banding and it's uttrly horrible.
Avoid it at all costs.

^Image.

-Acutance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance
This is a pretty nifty technique to make something a lot more readable.

As you can see, the pillar on the left is a lot more clear to the eye, because of the thin bands of increased contrast at the edges.

Also, might want to find a better example, early pokemon sprites suffer a lot from bad pixelart techniques.

Your definitions of Pillowing/pillow shading and Banding are very specific examples of the meaning. They don't cover the broad meaning of the words.

Anyhow, nice job.

Damn, I could of used this when I was starting out. Nice to see you helping the aspiring you spriters in any case.

HUE SHIFTING: When creating colors in a ramp for shading, adjust for more than just brightness. use hue as well. in general, this helps improve contrast. however, it can also make the colors appear to be more realistic. if hues are changed excessively it may appear strange, however.


here is an example of two green ramps. the one on the left uses the same hue for each color, while the one on the right has brighter colors shifted towards yellow and darker colors shifted towards blue.

unfortunately, this isn't always that incredibly relevant for CC sprites, i don't think.

Might want to fix that.

No, it is. Dithering doesn't work in CC because the sprites are arbitrarily rotated so unless you just want some texture it looks like ass as far as "smooth shading" is concerned, hue shifting however is handy to achieve good lighting contrast even in high colour count work.

Hue shifting is always relevant.
Darker colors are colder colors, lighter colors warmer colors.

I use it all the time, very handy for making sprites more interesting.

I once read a neat article by Helm on pixel art theory. Does anyone know the one I'm talking about? Could be relevant.

"Pillowing" or Pillow Shading is shading where the image gets darker around its edges or outlines. This is extremely ugly and should never EVER happen.

Pillow shading is also a precursor to Banding.

Banding is where the edges of two pixel shapes lie on the same grid lines. The brain immediately spots this defect and realizes the pattern of pixel art- everything lies on a square grid.
This instantaneously breaks any illusion or semblance of a high resolution.

This can go to extremes in cases such as:


Example of more subtle banding.

Banding is a crime against humanity and should be reported immediately to the Geneva Convention.

See: Best Pixel Art Tutorial in The History of Mankind.

Wait what?
Dammit. I found the link by myself and everything.

Hadn't known Helm had compiled those tutorials of his onto one site before I posted that just now.
BOOKMARK'D