How to Make an Inferno/Pillowshade (Paint)

For this tutorial you'll want to know how to create a pallete and how to recolor. The detailed tutorial for recoloring is here. We currently do not have a tutorial for creating a pallete, you'll want to look those up online. If you know how to create a pallete and want to create a detailed tutorial for them please come check out this thread for how to do that.



Step 1.

Take your sprite and open it up into Paint, you'll want to keep it in the top left of the page so you can quickly zoom in and out to see how it looks. To zoom you hold down control and scroll your middle mouse button, or the little wheel that's in the middle of your mouse.



You'll want to keep the background pure white just so that it doesn't distract you. Make sure that you have a pallete for your inferno and keep it next to your sprite so you don't have to move around to find it.



Note that when you make your pallete you want to go from dark to light shades quickly, you don't want to make it a gradual change or else it won't be showing on your pallete enough. An example of two palletes that achieve this is:






This also shows that you aren't stuck with just one color for this, make inferno/pillowshades out of whatever colors you want!



You want to start out with the darkest color of your pallete, because for inferno/pillowshade you go from dark to light. If you want to you can switch around your pallete so that the darkest shades are where you would normally start from.



I'll be doing two sprites here, the first one will be a simple one to show you how the process is done. The second sprite will be a more advanced one to show how to work with harder sprites.



Step 2.

Take the darkest shade of your pallete and place it on all the outlines. You can do this by eyedropping with the left-mouse button over the black outline, and the darkest color on the outline as well. Please remember that it's not just the outside of the sprite, but something such as the outline of a paw!



For the "simple" sprite I'll be doing a Drifblim. After doing this first step it should look like:




You can use the eye-dropper technique on this or you can go in and manually place down the darkest shade on the outlines. Whichever is easiest on the current sprite, sometimes you'll find that using the eye-dropper tool colors pixels that you didn't want it to.



Step 3.

This time you'll move onto the next shade, the one that is a bit lighter than the darkest one. You'll go around the edges of the darkest shade. Depending on how big a sprite is you'll want to go in 1-3 pixels. Try not to do too much, especially when there are small areas such as in the arms or the head fluff on this Drifblim.





Starting to look interesting yes? One thing you'll notice is that I'm leaving the eyes as they are. While I let the outsides of the eyes become the darkest shading, I've left the internal eyes there. You don't exactly have to do that if you don't want to, but that's how I've learned this type of style so therefore this is what I've stuck with.



Step 4.

Continue going inwards, using lighter shades as you move inward until you get to the final result.







Step 5.

Once you get to the last shade of your pallete and see that you still have a big chunk left on your sprite, such as in this Drifblim, you can just fill that space in with the last shade. You don't need to keep making new shades for this. It would just not look as good.







And there we have our Drifblim inferno/pillowshade completed!



Extras

Multi Colors

Just so you know, this type of spriting doesn't just require you to use one kind of pallete, such as the Drifblim was. You don't have to make it just, for example, overall red. You can actually use different palletes for different parts if you'd like. One example is this one here using the two palletes I showed at the beginning. This example is also meant to be the more "advanced" sprite.







One thing to note is that you don't have to inferno/pillowshade the mouth of the sprite. I've done it both ways and prefer neither one. Nor do you actually have to inferno/pillowshade things like claws, they can end up looking strange as shown in the Slowbro sprite.



Using the sprite's colors

You're not just limited to creating your own palletes. You can even use the sprite's original colors to make an inferno/pillowshade.


Now with this I've separated out the different colored areas, as shown with the three separate colors used on the outlines. I have three different palletes as well. Because I don't want to start using the original colors, because I'll get confused since they're already on the sprite, I use bright colors to make sure I know what goes where.



You can also see that on mine I didn't outline the patterns on Noctowl's chest. You can choose whether to do that or not, I simply decided not to.



For myself I work on different areas, so I'll be working on the blue area first, since I want to reuse colors later on for both the green and the red area.






And there is my blue area "colored in". Now I'm going to select each individual color and recolor it to what it's supposed to be.






Now moving onto the green area. This time I won't be doing the insides of the claws, just to see how that turns out.







And finally the red area.








As you can see Noctowl has a lot of similar colors across the body, so it looks a little bland overall. But you get the general idea here.



Now you should know all you need to when it comes to creating inferno/pillowshade. Any further questions just go ahead and ask and I'll try to answer them as best as I can.



Don't be afraid to experiment! Once you learn how to properly make them go ahead and twist things around, do them differently. Just make it your own style!



If you have any questions please feel free to ask them!