In the end I adjust the skin right below the hair with some “shadow” pixels. In the end I add some bright white highlights (You can’t see them that well because of the light color) and add it to the base. The brightest on the upper left, everything else slightly less strong shaded with that color. Now it’s time to add the highlights following the same scheme. They get darker on the right and at the lower and and the lower parts even get black outlines, no matter which color the hair originally is! In this step I also shaded the darkest parts. Since the faces are still not very large (sure, in relation to the body, but not as standalone) changing a few pixels will make a lot of difference. Since our light source ist above our char and slightly on the left side, there the lines are the lightest. First something that seems just to be a tiny detail, but can do a lot about how good the sprite expresses the character it stands for the face.
As second step I adjusted the colors on these lines in black, lighter and darker lines. As result the steps between the colors still fit well enough into the scheme, but have the tone I was looking for.Īs second step I added the outlines to the hair and divided it into the strains. Since I found no matching tone in the default sprites, I took the palette of the hair of another char and adjusted the hue, tone and brightness. On the right side of her head you see the palette I used for that. To get the result we want, I at first roughly scribble the shape of the final hairstyle.
