I usually start with clearing the palette by first pressing PAL (or just the P-Key) and then
pressing zap unused. This will turn your palette to total white (except 4 colors).
Then I spread the first row (color 1 - 16) from black to white. This is now my basic palette. And remember:
It's is possible to change the palette during image creation.
2. Drawing an outline
First create a nice background color that you think would fit to your image. With only one color you start
drawing an outline. This outline does not need to be perfect since it's going to be erased by the colors you
will put over it. When you have an outline and you like it, then it's time to start filling it.
3. Filling in the basic colors
Adjust your palette so you have the colors you would like to use for your picture. Then you color the
different areas. Unhappy with the result? Just adjust the palette until you're satisfied. (As you might notice,
there are a lot of palette changes all the time, but that's necessary to keep the image the way you want it.)
4. Making Shadows
When you've filled your object you'll notice that it's looking rather flat, so you've to make shadows.
Use a big brush and a stencil function to create shadows.
But where and on which side should these shadows be? A tip: Imagine a spot somewhere on the screen.
That spot is where all the light comes from, which means that if an area is facing the sport it should be
bright and vice versa.
5. Smoothing
So you got a nice image with a fairly good looking object. But.. it looks kinda squared. Well since all the
pixels are squares they won't give you a nice round shape if you don't do something about it. There are two things
you can do: Anti-alising (AA) or a technique where you place pixels like in the picture below on the right.
AA is rather hard to do, it's all about setting the palette. On the left pictures, there are two lines, the
one on the left with AA and the other without AA.
Just apply one of those two techniques between the color differences, and you'll soon have a picture that
has some quality.
6. Polishing
Now only the polishing is left. You correct one pixel here and one pixel there until you feel that the whole
picture is right and the way you wanted it.
But wait a minute, that's not good this way. I'm not sure about those background colors, so let's change
them.
